Does there exist only one, universally valid, research ethic? Are informed consent and ethical committees the best means to ensure the moral correctness of research? Again, what consequences ensue from the introduction of these instruments for the freedom of research and the quality of its results? This article addresses these issues by first recounting an ethnography conducted by its author in...

The process of globalization entails the acquisition of a construct, cultural intelligence, with which EFL students can function appropriately in intercultural situations. This study was, first, intended to find the relationship between cultural intelligence and the use of expressions of gratitude by Iranian EFL learners. Second, it sought to determine whether there were any significant differe...

The area of cross-cultural management and organization studies has been dominated by Hofstede’s (1980a) seminal work on cultural values dimensions. Despite much recent criticism, and perhaps because of it, he remains the most cited author in this area. It is difficult to start any account in this field without reference to his work, and this is certainly the starting point here. This chapter fi...

CULTURAL SAMPLE The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, or SCCS (Murdock and White 1969), is a cumulative and collaborative database of coded variables on maximally diverse and ethnographically best-described societies used by scholars in the social sciences. The champion of modern cross-cultural and statistical methods, George P. Murdock, in preparation for a standard sample, had classified the 1,...

In the enormous collection of cross-cultural data that have been published during the last few decades it is difficult to perceive patterns. There is a clear need for systematizing the vast amount of cross-cultural studies and for developing models that explain cross-cultural differences in psychology. Two methods of crosscultural meta-analysis can be distinguished. First, the instrument-based ...

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample contains the best-described society in each of 186 cultural provinces of the world, chosen so that cultural independence of each unit in terms of historical origin and cultural diffusion could be considered maximal with respect to the others societies in the sample. Often the time period chosen is that of the earliest high quality ethnographic description. Hen...

The aim of the study was a cross-cultural comparison of personality traits between individuals from two very different cultures and refugees who resettled several years before from one to the other. Four hundred forty four Swedish individuals of the normal population; and 100 Iranian refugees in Sweden, and a group of 335 individuals from Tehran, capital of Iran, were investigated by means of t...

Manipulatives are tools to which teachers may resort to help pupils overcome learning difficulties in elementary school Mathematics. Building on innovative information and communication technology, tangible interfaces aggregate new forms of interaction to the benefits of traditional manipulatives. Following a context-based methodology, we designed a tangible interface aimed at offering material...

Defining Pragmatics offers a conceptual survey of the delimitation of pragmatics. We identify the problems that have plagued attempts to define the field. Such endeavors occupied pragmatists quite a lot in the 1970s and 1980s, but when no satisfactory solution was found, researchers simply settled into separate niches and practices of how to do pragmatics. Some, perhaps even most, pragmatists s...

Sentimentality and nostalgia are two similar psychological constructs, which play an important role in the emotional lives of elderly people who are usually focused on the past. There are two objectives of this study - making cross-cultural comparison of sentimentality and nostalgia among Bulgarian and Greek elderly people using a questionnaire, and establishing the psychometric properties of t...