Cluster Analysis in Cross-cultural Research

One traditional way to reduce the dimensionality of the data is to use some variant of principle component analysis, a technique that permits us to determine which traits are related. Nevertheless, if we wish to determine which societies are the most similar or different using the results of the derived principle components, difficulties begin to arise because, according to one factor, two societies may be very different while, according to another factor, they may be quite similar. Other analytic problems arise because the results may depend upon whether we employ a standard principle component analysis, where, in effect, each factor is removed before the next factor is derived (thus deriving orthogonal factors) or some type of varimax technique in which the factors may be related.