Abstract

Provides methodological suggestions from cross-cultural psychology that may be applied to parapsychology. The universality of psi can be properly assessed only if various cross-cultural factors (e.g., mother-child relationships and cognitive style) can be controlled. Three conclusions are drawn: (1) Cross-cultural research is necessary to distinguish socialization effects from maturation effects and to ensure the generality or universality of process-oriented research; (2) unless research designs are representative of the way in which psi functions in everyday life, they do not provide a valid basis to generalize about psi processes; and (3) if cross-cultural research is to provide the basis for valid comparisons, functional, conceptual, and metric equivalences as well as sample representativeness must be established. (38 ref)