Assessing the Validity of Different Approaches to Operationalizing Cultural Theory in Survey Research

Swedlow, Brendon; Ripberger, Joseph T.; Liu, Li‐Yin; Silva, Carol L.; Jenkins‐Smith, Hank C.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2860961

Cited by 15 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 46 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…CT scholars have been debating whether individual cultural bias should be classified as a dominant culture in four quadrants or measured by four indices indicating different levels for each of the four types of culture. This paper argues that each individual should be treated as a hybrid of the four types of culture and uses four cultural indices separately to measure each of the cultures [16,17]. CT scholars have noticed that worldview is not an ideal measurement for culture and suggested that a combination of worldview and relational statement measures have better validity [52].…”

Section: Methods and Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to the CT, people have different preferences of how the society should be organized, which influences how they evaluate and respond to risk [17]. Different from the traditional rational model which assumes that people rationalize their choices based upon cost benefit analysis, culture theory assumes that people think and act in certain ways that are consistent with their culture [15,16,25,31]. In other words, individuals will view the issue that opposes their preferred lifestyles as dangerous, and act on their perceived danger from the issue [28,32].…”

Section: Cultural Worldviews and Pro-environmental Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, existing research mainly built on the rational choice model (RCM) or relied on individual cost-benefit analysis [12,13]. Like other cultural scholars, this paper tries to look to what RCM cannot explain by using the culture theory [14][15][16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Environmental Risk Perception, Risk Culture, and Pro-Environmental Behavior

Zeng

Jiang

Yuan

2020

IJERPH

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Mixed evidence exists regarding the relationship between environmental risk perception and pro-environmental behavior. This study uses an existing online survey conducted by the Center of Ecological Civilization (CEC) of China University of Geosciences from December 2015 to March 2016 and examines how cultural bias influences environmental risk perception and behavior. We found that an individual's pro-environmental behavior is not only influenced by environmental risk perception, but also by his or her cultural worldviews. Built on culture theory (CT), our empirical results suggest that young Chinese people are more located in "high-group" culture, where egalitarian culture and hierarchical culture dominate. The higher scores of hierarchical and egalitarian cultures of Chinese youth, the more likely they are to protect the environment. Moreover, the relationship between cultural worldviews and pro-environmental behaviors are mediated by perceived environmental risks. culture influences pro-environmental behavior directly. This study also tries to test the generalizability of CT by applying CT to non-Western countries.This paper uses an existing online survey conducted by the Center for Ecological Civilization of China University of Geosciences (CEC) from December 2015 to March 2016. Our sample includes 8084 students from 152 universities in 30 provinces across China, who were surveyed on the Internet. This research makes contributions in four aspects. First, this large-scale data allows us to map the distribution of environmental risk perception and pro-environmental behavior among young people in China. Second, this paper is the first research testing the influence of individuals' cultural worldviews on pro-environmental behavior in China. More specifically, we test the effects of culture worldviews, environmental risk perception and other control variables, including knowledge and demographics, on pro-environmental behavior. Third, this paper analyzes how the relationship between risk culture and pro-environmental behavior is mediated by an individual's cultural bias. Fourth, Douglas (1982) used the "grid-group" framework to analyze how the relations between individuals and society determine people's perception of risk. CT was then introduced by Wildavsky to study politics in the United States and was applied to many western countries [23]. However, there is only a few pieces of research on China [21,22]. This study will contribute to improve CT's generalizability by applying CT to Chinese context and providing some implications for measuring culture based on existing research.The paper starts with a review of CT and its application in China. Based on the theory and existing research on the relationships among cultures, environmental risk perception, and pro-environmental behavior, we suggest three sets of research hypotheses in Section 2. Section 3 introduces data, variables, and methods used to test our hypotheses. Section 4 describes the result of our data testing and examines its robustness. Section 5 is t...

show abstract

Section: Methods and Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cultural Worldviews and Pro-environmental Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Environmental Risk Perception, Risk Culture, and Pro-Environmental Behavior

Zeng

Jiang

Yuan

2020

IJERPH

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…When it comes to the results of this study regarding cultural biases, in the United States, the distribution of cultural biases reveals that individualists are the majority, followed by hierarchs, and then egalitarians (Swedlow et al., ); very few had a fatalistic worldview. In contrast, most Taiwanese are fatalists, followed by hierarchs and individualists.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%

How Radical Is Too Radical? Public Perception of Taiwanese Environmental Nonprofit Organizations’ Activism*

Liu

2018

Social Science Quarterly

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective This study sought answers to two important unasked questions: (1) How does the Taiwanese public perceive different types of environmental activism initiated by environmental nonprofit organizations (ENPOs)? And (2) How does culture influence these perceptions? Methods This study utilized cultural theory (CT) to develop hypotheses to test data collected through an online survey in Taiwan. Results The evidence confirms what CT predicted: egalitarians tended to consider protest‐based environmental activities as effective and acceptable, while individualists tended to have negative thoughts about the effectiveness and acceptance of protest‐based activities. Conclusion This study found that CT can also be helpful in studying environmental activism, especially in countries, like Taiwan, where ideological lines and partisan differences on environmental issues are not clear. Moreover, compared to conventional partisan and ideological explanations, CT better explains the determinants of public perceptions regarding environmental activities.

show abstract

“…Cultural theory (CT) provides a framework for understanding how social dimensions shape cultural bias and social relations of individuals, including values, views of the natural world, policy preferences, and risk perceptions (Swedlow et al 2016;Thompson et al 1990). These biases will influence how climate protection policies are formulated and received, and because CT can be applied cross-nationally (Johnson and Swedlow 2020b;Maleki and de Jong 2014;Maleki and Hendriks 2015), it is appropriate to apply it to a global problem like climate change.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Operationalization of Cultural Theory through Surveys Investigating the Social Aspects of Climate Change Policy Making

Cambardella

Fath

Werdenigg

et al. 2020

Weather, Climate, and Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cultural Theory (CT) provides a framework for understanding how social dimensions shape cultural bias and social relations of individuals, including values, view of the natural world, policy preferences, and risk perceptions. The five resulting cultural solidarities are each associated with a “myth of nature”—a concept of nature that aligns with the worldview of each solidarity. When applied to the problem of climate protection policymaking, the relationships and beliefs outlined by CT can shed light on how members of the different cultural solidarities perceive their relationship to climate change and associated risk. This can be used to deduce what climate change management policies may be preferred or opposed by each group. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of how CT has been used in quantitative surveys of the social aspects of climate change policymaking, to assess the construct validity of these studies, and to identify ways for climate change protection policies to leverage the views of each of the cultural solidarities to develop clumsy solutions: policies that incorporate strengths from each of the cultural solidarities’ perspectives. Surveys that include measures of at least fatalism, hierarchism, individualism, and egalitarianism, their associated myths of nature as well as measures of climate change risk perceptions and policy preferences have the highest translation and predictive validity. These studies will be useful in helping environmental managers find clumsy solutions and develop resilient policy according to C.S. Holling’s adaptive cycle.

show abstract

Assessing the Validity of Different Approaches to Operationalizing Cultural Theory in Survey Research

Cited by 15 publications

References 46 publications

Environmental Risk Perception, Risk Culture, and Pro-Environmental Behavior

Environmental Risk Perception, Risk Culture, and Pro-Environmental Behavior

How Radical Is Too Radical? Public Perception of Taiwanese Environmental Nonprofit Organizations’ Activism*

Assessing the Operationalization of Cultural Theory through Surveys Investigating the Social Aspects of Climate Change Policy Making

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About