Table_1_A comparative study on culture-specific and cross-cultural aspects of intercultural relations in Hungary, Serbia, Czech Republic, and Germany.docx

The ability, will, and belief that it is possible to deal effectively with members of other cultural/ethnic groups are still gaining importance all over the world. However, the majority of studies on intercultural relations focus on Western Europe and the USA, applying constructs and theories that replicate a western-centered worldview. As a consequence, it is unclear whether established measures for intergroup attitudes and intercultural competence may be applied in Eastern European countries and to what extent they display comparable ideas, thoughts, and feelings. The current study thus explores cross-cultural commonalities and differences in established measures of ethnic identity, prejudice, acculturation strategies, intercultural intelligence, and multicultural personality. Therefore, we compare the scale structure, difficulty, and sensitivity in samples from Germany and the Eastern European countries Hungary, Serbia, and the Czech Republic (etic-perspective), as well as the culture-specific conceptions of said concepts (emic-perspective). Results show that the investigated scales do not work comparably across German and Eastern European samples. Differences might be rooted in variations of underlying thinking patterns and connotations of single expressions. Those variations are likely to be related to the constant individual societal and historical developments of cultures, shaping the way individuals think and talk about cultural diversity. Future studies are encouraged to consider culture-specific and generalizable aspects of constructs when conducting cross-cultural research on intercultural relations.

有效应对其他文化/族裔群体的能力、意愿与信念，如今在全球范围内的重要性与日俱增。然而，当前绝大多数跨文化关系领域研究均以西欧与美国为核心研究对象，所采用的研究构念与理论均复刻了西方中心主义的世界观。因此，目前尚不明确已有的群体间态度与跨文化能力测量工具是否可应用于东欧国家，也不清楚这些工具在当地能在多大程度上反映出相似的观念、想法与情感。
本研究就此展开探索，针对已有的民族认同、偏见、文化适应策略、跨文化智能（intercultural intelligence）以及多元文化人格测量工具，分析其跨文化层面的共性与差异。为此，我们分别从客位视角（etic-perspective）与主位视角（emic-perspective），对比德国以及东欧国家匈牙利、塞尔维亚与捷克共和国的样本中各量表的结构、难度与敏感性，并剖析上述概念的文化特异性内涵。
研究结果显示，所考察的量表在德国与东欧样本中的适配效果并不具备可比性。此类差异可能源于潜在思维模式与单一表述内涵的差异。上述差异或与各文化持续演进的社会与历史发展进程息息相关，这些进程塑造了个体思考与谈论文化多样性的方式。
我们鼓励未来开展跨文化关系相关研究时，兼顾研究构念的文化特异性与可推广性。