Cross-Cultural Comparison as Doorkeeper in Research on the Social and Emotional Adjustment of Children and Adolescents

Cross-cultural comparison serves a crucial function as a final test of paradigms that emerge in intracultural studies of child and adolescent adjustment and maladjustment. Beliefs about child and adolescent adjustment are inextricably linked to cultural values regarding the place of the individual in society. Socialization practices and coping behaviors differ in adaptive significance according to the economic structure of a society and its value system. It is argued that the doorkeeper function of cross-cultural research is performed most effectively when a wide range of cultures are sampled, for which core beliefs are measured directly and not inferred from the general literature on each culture, and multiple sources of information are tapped.