A Dataset of Scientists’ Cultural Typologies in the Western China (2019)

In the study of human-land relations, the need to better reflect the role of cultural factors has become increasingly prominent. For example, the decoupling relationship between people and the land takes into account the lifestyle of local residents. The system of building ecosystem services increasingly includes cultural services and recognizing that local residents and their cultural knowledge are the key to resource utilization and environmental governance. Therefore, cooperation among geographers, biodiversity experts, human sociologists, and management decision makers on cultural issues is becoming more and more popular. In May 2019, according to the cultural theory of Mary Douglas, a judgment scale consisting of 40 topics was constructed, and four cultural types, including individualism, hierarchyism, egalitarianism and fatalism, were carried out for S&T workers in the western region of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The investigation work consists of two steps. The first step named the pre-investigation invited 10 S&T workers from different positions to participate in the answer and self-evaluation and invited 9 evaluation experts who had mastered or had studied the cultural theory and knew all the pre-surveyed testees for 3 years or more to participate in the verification. The verification results show that the Kappa coefficient of the self-evaluation of the participants is 0.861, which means a high degree of consistency. The Kappa coefficient of the expert discriminant is 0.714, which is highly consistent. The second step of the network survey takes an institute in the western region of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for an example. A total of 113 data were collected, of which 101 were valid data. The survey results show that most of the S&T workers in the western part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences are hierarchical and egalitarian, a little bit part is individualism and there is little fatalism. Through this dataset, researchers can analyze the cultural types and work attitudes of S&T workers of different genders, ages and positions.