Families Across Cultures; A 30-Nation Psychological Study.

The five authors of this extraordinary book are all professors of psychology with a special interest in cross-cultural psychology and work at universities in Greece, Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey and Belgium. They came together in their quest to learn more about the relationship between the changes of the eco-cultural realities such as economic organization, political institutions, legal and educational systems and religion in 30 nations and the family, as expressed by family structure, demographies, family rules, functions, values and observed changes. Their hope was to clarify to what extent globalization or an increase in educational opportunities modifies family traditions, such as relationships between family members, parental divorce rates, the role of fathers and mothers etc. This is based on the authors premise that the family is an institution which is adapted to its ecological, cultural and sociopolitical situation and provides the main context for the ontogenetic development from infancy to adulthood. To obtain reliable and valid data, they interviewed and evaluated the opinions of some 5,500 students at colleges and universities in 30 countries, chosen to reflect specific geopolitical zones. There was a northern, central and southern zone of North America, including the US, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Brazil; a northern and southern zone in Europe, including the UK, Germany, Holland, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus etc; a North (Algeria)), East (Saudi Arabia), Central (Ghana) and South African zone, and a western (Iran, Ukraine), southern (Pakistan, India), eastern (China, Japan, South Korea) and Oceana (Indonesia) zone in Asia. The chosen countries also reflected the major religious groups in the world. The book is divided into 2 parts. In part 1, the reader is introduced to the theoretical aspect of the study in 8 distinctive chapters. Beginning with a historical review of families and family change, one learns about methodologies used in assessing family functioning over time and the results of past studies. Other chapters describe the methodology of the present study, explain its hypotheses and provide the statistical data forming the results. In part 2, the 30 nations are examined individually, using very similar overall criteria. These include: a historical outline of the country described; important ecological features (e.g. location, size, weather, special challenges such as annual dry winds, etc.); economic organization; political and legal institutions; the major educational systems and main religions. The family is discussed by detailing marital traditions (e.g., restrictions of marrying direct relatives, choosing a wife, etc.); family structure (patriarchal, nuclear, patrilocal, e.g., determining how close sons have to live to their father after marriage, etc.) or kinship ties; family roles and functions (role and powers of mother, father, grandparents, etc.); and recent changes observed in the family. There are also appendices providing copies of the various questionnaires, scales and other assessment instruments used in the study. While the authors provide many interesting data, there are some overarching findings. Despite the popular impression that there are more three generation families in the “Majority World” (denoting the world outside North America and Europe), this is incorrect as keeping three generations and/or large families in one house requires money which is not plentiful in the majority world. Cultural differences overall, based on emotional and material interdependence vs. independence, are more pronounced between rural and agricultural populations in the western and majority world. This means that in addition to the emotional value, children retain financial value only in agricultural and rural populations of the majority world while middle class city people all over the world and those living in western rural areas value their children’s material independence but support their emotional interdependence. This dialectic synthesis suggests that even in westernized societies we find an increasing interdependent emotional aspect of the family which reminds us of our past cultural heritage. This is also shown in the high value kinship relationships have all over the world, expressed by the number of telephone calls made to relatives in the west and visits to relatives in the majority world. Another example of these cultural universals that have not been modified despite our more global existence is the fact that fathers universally still do not do much housework while mothers everywhere are more engaged in child care. Nevertheless, the authoritarian hierarchy based role of fathers has declined in all cultural groups, regardless of religion and income although there remain significant differences among the 30 nations. The book’s main shortcoming is the relatively small number of subjects, varying from 65 to 450 per nation that the authors could enroll and, as university students, their potentially biased view of their own culture. While this may bias the collected data, the authors’ effort to use standardized instruments and questionnaires and their most thoughtful interpretation of their data provide the reader with a fascinating look into both cultural universals and differences in family characteristics across cultures.

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