Contemporary scholarly critique in Indigenous research spaces has tended to focus on binary dualities, including the purpose of Indigenous-focused research, and the legitimacy of researcher identity, research knowledge and truth. Yet, perhaps unintentionally, such interrogation has led to the continued (re)construction and maintenance of false race-based dichotomies. In this paper, one way in which we seek to step beyond binary race-based discourses is by advocating for the advancement of cross-cultural research practices that interweave traditional and contemporary communication practices. We put forward the case that by knitting together Eurocentric and Indigenous research methodologies, Lawrence-Lightfoot's (2005, Qualitative Inquiry 11, 3–15) portraiture method, and Aboriginal practices of storytelling/yarning, the cross-cultural oral narrative portraiture method enables co-construction of more holistic, culturally nuanced and responsive stories, where meaning, context and reason resonate. In the 21st century research space, we open dialogue for thinking about data as stories, and advocate for contemporary intercultural research processes that are inclusive, engaging and promote co-construction of narratives for storying.

This study examined the relations between receptive language development and other developmental domains of preschoolers from low-income families, through an inter-cultural perspective involving the United States and Turkey. A total of 471 children and their caregivers participated in Turkey, while 287 participated in the United States. Children's development was assessed using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire for both samples. Different versions of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test were used for Turkish and US samples, to measure receptive language development. Results revealed similar patterns, with some differences, between the two countries. Receptive language predicted only communication and personal–social scales in the Turkish sample, while the US children's receptive language skills were associated with communication, problem solving, personal–social, and fine and gross motor development scales. These results were discussed in the context of each country, and the comparative conclusions contribute to the extant literature by illustrating the importance of language for three domains.

Violators of cooperation norms may be informally punished by their peers. How such norm enforcement is judged by others can be regarded as a meta-norm (i.e., a second-order norm). We examined whether meta-norms about peer punishment vary across cultures by having students in eight countries judge animations in which an agent who over-harvested a common resource was punished either by a single peer or by the entire peer group. Whether the punishment was retributive or restorative varied between two studies, and findings were largely consistent across these two types of punishment. Across all countries, punishment was judged as more appropriate when implemented by the entire peer group than by an individual. Differences between countries were revealed in judgments of punishers vs. non-punishers. Specifically, appraisals of punishers were relatively negative in three Western countries and Japan, and more neutral in Pakistan, UAE, Russia, and China, consistent with the influence of individualism, power distance, and/or indulgence. Our studies constitute a first step in mapping how meta-norms vary around the globe, demonstrating both cultural universals and cultural differences.

In this paper we introduce the concept of ’polycontextuality,’ which refers to multiple and qualitatively different contexts embedded within one another. We distinguish polycontextuality from the singularly contextual types of description typically provided by social scientists, and use the case of China to elucidate polycontextual phenomena. Polycontextuality can include verbal- and non-verbal nuances whose understanding is rooted in local, cognitive, emotional and even spiritual references -most of which cannot be easily observed or historically studied. For this reason we recommend the polycontexual sensitive research method to supplement the scientific deductive research typically designed to study observable phenomena based on a singular context (e.g. verbal) that are controllable by the researcher's stimuli and/or measures. Actions for increasing scholars’ polycontextual sensitivity are suggested, and guidelines for the scholar interested in doing high quality indigenous research are offered, using the case of China for illustrative purposes.

Qualitative knowledge on ethnicity and aging remains sparse and needs to be expanded. Qualitative research suggests a promising route to better understanding of different ethnic groups as well as of intra-ethnic group diversity. However, such research is not problem-free. This paper presents three interview scenarios, discusses a number of problems noted in the existing literature as well as some problems the author has encountered in the course of research and raises important issues relating to conducting interviews with ethnic seniors for qualitative studies.

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.

The international pilot study of schizophrenia (IPSS) was the first major study to show that the use of standardised assessment and classification instruments allows the reliable comparison of data on the prevalence, psychopathology and prognosis of major psychiatric illness between different cultures. Important questions about the methodology used in cross-cultural research remain to be answered, however These include the inherently ‘Eurocentric’ nature of much of western psychiatric terminology and the absence of directly comparable concepts and language to describe emotional and psychological distress between western and non-western cultures. These difficulties especially arise in relation to illness where organic factors appear to contribute little to aetiology, such as the neurotic and Axis II disorders, and need to be overcome before useful crosscultural research into these disorders can be accomplished.