Exploring cross-cultural conflict studies through semantic algorithms

Abstract

The way people handle conflicts differ from one culture to another culture, but why are the cross-cultural research findings showing the same results for both Asian and Western cultures? The purpose of the study is to gain clarity on the limitation of cross-cultural methodology within the conflict topic. This was investigated through digital text analyses and thereby linked to 11 published studies on Chinese culture. The algorithm was used to test the semantic relationship between scale and to recreate the original findings from the previous published studies. The semantic algorithm knows nothing about culture or conflict as a topic but gained almost the same results as the survey-based method where the Chinese population were the respondents. This shows that the methodology used when conducting crosscultural research has several limitations that needs to be taken into consideration. Research methods used in cross-cultural research therefore needs to be reviewed and complemented by objective statistics rather than self-rating questionnaires as they are proven to not capture attitude strength and thereby cultural differences. Current conflict theories should be tested through measurements items developed by local researchers to ensure that the specific theory is valid within a geographical culture. Across both geographical areas and sample groups, the results reflect the same since surveys only can answer the semantic relation of the sentences, but not detect the cultural differences.