This programme is designed for advanced Master’s students, PhD students, and young researchers but is open to all. 

Participants do not need any advanced knowledge of statistics but they should be familiar with a few basic notions, such as a correlation between variables and statistical significance. Even some of these basic concepts will be re-examined in class (especially statistical significance) as most people tend to hold incorrect concepts of them. 

We open with the conceptual ground for everything that follows what culture is, where cultural differences come from, and how to design a study.

• Definitions of culture: What is culture and what is not culture? Where does culture come from? What creates cultural differences?

• Data selection: covering what kind of survey participants should we choose, what kind of items work or do not work, how to test adaptation across languages and cultural contexts and the foundations of analysis at the individual level.

We move from designing studies to the question that decides whether comparisons across cultures are meaningful in the first place: do our measures mean the same thing in different places?

• Levels of analysis: the difference between studying individuals and societies.

• Measurement invariance: what it is, why it matters, when it is needed, and when it is not.

• Hands-on demonstration of invariance testing in R, with takeaway materials for participants who want to apply the techniques to their own data.

On day 3 we turn to cultural differences between nations: why societies around the world differ in such striking ways, how these differences can be studied scientifically, and what they can tell us about human societies..

• Measuring cultural differences: classic frameworks, their evolution, revision, and newer approaches.

• Origins of cultural differences: explanations of cross-national variation and cultural change.

• Consequences of culture: what cultural differences predict and how they shape societies.

• Hands-on demonstration of how national cultural indices are constructed.

During the programme you get:

• The opportunity to discuss your personal research project with the lecturers and the other course participants.

• A pre-course questionnaire so the lecturers can tailor examples to your project and statistical experience.

• An SPSS dataset containing country scores on all popular dimensions of national culture (Hofstede’s, Inglehart’s, Bond’s, Project GLOBE’s and more), as well as various national indicators: values from the World Values Survey, GDP per person in different years, national educational achievement and national IQ, a rule-of-law index, etc.

• Possibility to view recordings of the sessions until three months after the workshop

We reserve the right to adjust the course dates in case the current dates cannot be aligned with the lecturer’s regular teaching schedule, which is only known at the beginning of the semester. Participants will naturally be refunded if they cannot make it on the new dates.

Please read the terms and conditions at the link