Toward Defining Situations Objectively

There is recognition that an understanding of the situation is essential to our understanding of behavior, but that there is a scarcity of resources for situational analysis. Most studies use individual perceptions of behaviors as input for situational analysis. Such analyses, however, make the situation a projection of personality processes. To identify one aspect of the objective situation, this study extends the work of Marwell and Hage by developing culture-level taxonomies of role dyads, defined in terms of objective context variables, in two cultures: Hong Kong and Australia. The results reveal similarity of culture-level relational space defined by four dimensions: complexity, equality, adversarialness, and containment. Cultural differences are expressed in the location of role dyads within this space. These differing positions of any given role dyad may be combined with personality variables in the future to help explain differences in social behavior.