Operationalizing Cultural Theory in Survey Research: Assessing the Validity of Different Approaches to Conceptualisation and Measurement

This paper surveys efforts to operationalize the cultural theory (CT) developed by Douglas and Wildavsky and introduces two new measures that are designed to capture individual orientations with respect to worldviews associated with the cultural types posited by the theory – egalitarianism, individualism, hierarchy, and fatalism. We also introduce new measures that seek to measure the grid and group relational dimensions of CT. Finally, we make use of the worldview measures of cultural cognition theory (CCT), which is based on CT but conceptualizes its relational dimensions differently. After presenting the measures we test their validity by comparing them to traditional indicators of worldview that are based on Karl Dake and Aaron Wildavsky. We find that there are trade-offs in face validity, convergent validity, and predictive validity among these measures. Based on these findings, we make suggestions for their appropriate use and suggest directions for further research.