Validating cultural models with cultural consensus theory.

Abstract

This article links the discovery process of creating a descriptive model with a verification process. Descriptive “models” distilled from qualitative interviews and narratives describe explanations, processes, expectations, possible beliefs, and appropriate responses. These models are mental models or schema for thinking about objects and relations between objects. When shared across people, they are cultural models. An issue of validity arises when we try to generalize to larger groups. This article describes three approaches for confirming descriptive models using cultural consensus theory combined with a mixed-methods approach. Cultural consensus offers a way to evaluate the amount of agreement among respondents and identifies salient themes. A first approach validates content by comparing themes in descriptive qualitative results with those identified with cultural consensus. A second approach validates content by explicitly stating descriptive model assumptions and then asking about them and uses cultural consensus to verify assumptions agreed upon by respondents. Agreement between models obtained descriptively and with cultural consensus offers evidence of convergent validity. A third approach goes a step further with construct validation and uses the cultural consensus cultural model to make predictions about other aspects of everyday life.

Distance from a cultural model of substance use risk, internalization, and self-stigma in urban Brazil

“…In-depth interviewing (including traditional ethnographic interviews, person-centered interviews, and free lists) is essential for eliciting the elements that make up an hypothesized cultural model and for describing how those elements are linked and distinguished ( Dengah et al, 2021 ). Then, a quantitative analysis employing cultural consensus theory ( Romney et al, 1986 ) can be used to verify that the model is shared and hence a cultural model (see Weller et al, 2023 ). Cultural consensus analysis can also be used to estimate how much of the knowledge encoded in the model is shared within a social group, and it can be used to estimate the most likely content encoded in the model.…”

The Domestication of Machismo in Brazil: Motivations, Reflexivity, and Consonance of Religious Male Gender Roles

“…Like many anthropological works, Brusco relies on qualitative data gathered through careful participant observation and interviews to make her argument. We take Brusco's findings as a starting point for our own research but contend that mixed-method and structured approaches (e.g., cultural consensus and cultural consonance) provide a valid empirical evaluation of qualitative and interpretive findings [8,9]. That is, we seek to not only replicate via quantitative methods Brusco's findings in Brazil among a wider sample of religious men, but also examine the relationship of individuals and culture via the motivations that compel religious Brazilian men to enact alternative forms of masculinity.…”