Response Styles by Country
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Aug 03, 2010
While it is well-established that response styles confound cross-cultural comparisons, there is no widely accepted theory on why or how cultures affect whether respondents are more likely to be agreeable (Acquiescence Response Style) or more likely to choose the endpoints of a rating scale (Extreme Response Style). Which makes it a shame that the 2005 paper “The Relation between Culture and Response Styles: Evidence from 19 Countries” hasn’t received more attention.
The authors - Timothy Johnson, Patrick Kulesa, Isr Llc, Young Ik Cho and Sharon Shavitt – analyze respondent behavior for correlations to Hofstede’s Four Dimensions of Culture:
- Power Distance – High power distance is the acceptance by the less powerful members of a culture that power is distributed unequally; this is a cultural perception, so a democracy like India can have a high power distance while a former communist country like Hungary can have a lower power distance.
- Quantity vs. Quality of Life – “Quantity of life” is the cultural value of competitiveness, assertiveness and material goods over relationships and quality of life.
- Individualism – Individualism is a cultural tendency towards self-identification apart from collectivist identification as a member of a family, faith, region or profession.
- Uncertainty Avoidance – Cultures with high uncertainty avoidance prefer explicit rules (faith and dietary restrictions) and formal structure.
How do these cultural values affect survey responses? Here is the authors’ conclusion, derived from data gathered from an employee satisfaction survey with 20,270 responses in 19 countries:
An extreme response style serves the goals of achieving clarity, precision, and decisiveness in one’s explicit verbal statements, characteristics that are valued in [quantity of life] and high-power-distance cultures. Consistent with this, the results indicated that persons in cultures with high [quantity of life] and with high power distance were more likely to select extreme response options on a questionnaire.
Acquiescent response styles were also found to have associations with several cultural orientations that were consistent with expectations. In particular, respondents from more individualistic nations were less likely to provide acquiescent answers, a finding supportive of Hofstede’s observation that conformity is less common in highly individualistic societies. Acquiescence was also greater among respondents within more uncertainty avoidant countries.
Applying their mathematical model on the cultural drivers of response behavior leads me to this comparison of response style by country:
(I estimated the United States results from Hofstede’s intercultural scores; the U.S. wasn’t included in the 19 countries studied.)
What is the practical significance of this study? You do not need to worry about response-style differences if the countries being compared are the same across Hofstede’s four dimensions: for instance, each of these pairs of countries--the UK & US, Belgium & France, Hungary & Italy, Malaysia & Singapore, and the Czech Republic & Poland. If the cultures are materially different, follow these tips for counteracting response style bias.
Good academic papers always end with a call for further research. When it comes to cross-cultural comparisons, here’s what I’d like to see:
- A validation of Johnson, Kulesa, Llc, Cho & Shavitt with a different cross-country survey
- An extension of the authors’ work to include other types of response styles
- A meta-analysis of other researchers’ cross-cultural comparisons of response styles by culture, which typically involve only a few cultures at a time.