Cultural Dimensions Reconsidered: Global and Regional Analyses of the Ethnographic Atlas

Developments in ethnographic data compilation over the past decade provide the basis for a new and extended study of the dimensions of culture. The approach taken in the current research was to apply various multivariate statistical analyses for the purpose of revealing the dimensions by which culture traits tend to be associated. Based on Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas, 65 cultural traits were coded, scaled, and intercorrelated over a sample of 863 societies. Intercorrelations were also computed between traits for each of six regional subsamples. Factor analyses were then performed on the intercorrelation matrices. The general results of these analyses were the identification of 14 dimensions of culture each of which was reasonably stable over culture regions and interpretable in terms of functional relationships. Hierarchical cluster analyses were also performed on the intercorrelation matrices for the dual purposes of sorting out spurious results attributed only to a particular method of analysis and also of developing an empirical model of the dimensional structure of culture. The theoretical implications, the utilizations, and the extensions of the results in future research were considered . [Ethnographic Atlas, cultural dimensions, culture trait associations, multivariate structural analyses]