Researchers from the UP Diliman (UPD) National Institute of Physics (NIP) have developed a data analytical technique for tracking temporal cultural evolutions.
An information-retrieval method for creating time-dependent culture maps was created and demonstrated by the research team composed of Caesar A. Saloma, John Lawrence Euste, and Hannah Christina Arjonillo.
The research team made use of the Integrated Values Survey (IVS) data. The IVS data is a merger of the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey; two large-scale cross-national and repeated cross-sectional survey research programs with data sets collected from over 120 countries. Conducted continuously from 1981 until 2022, the IVS has seven survey waves.
Using the principal component analysis, the researchers were able to extract a pair consisting of a cross-country map and a survey respondent-level map for each survey wave.
According to the researchers, “In the cross-country map, countries are plotted as individual points in a two-dimensional culture space, while in the respondent-level map of a country, the respondents are depicted as points distributed with respect to a mean location.” Further analysis showed that the cross-national map revealed the cultural differences among countries, while the individual-level map displays the cultural variations within a specific national population as indicated by the randomly chosen respondents.
The researchers pointed out that the ability to precisely identify slight variations in cultural values, especially in their development over time, would enable different groups to better understand one another, thus preventing detrimental disputes between nations, particularly the needless loss of lives.
The study Time-resolved culture maps derived from Integrated Values Survey data (1981-2022) is published in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, a peer-reviewed journal. It can be accessed through https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2024.130317—With reports from the NIP