Are Cultures at the Same Place in the Process Under Investigation?

In most of the studies on culture and conflict, we do not know if different groups are at the same place in the trajectory of the conflict process. To analyze where a group is in a process, we must first establish that the process is stable.

Once we create a stable process for each culture, we can determine whether the key variables relate differently within the cultures. Differences in results, even dramatic differ­ences, do not necessarily mean that the conflict process is different between cultures. Cultures may be thought to manage or respond to con­flict differently merely because, when assessed, the conflict system is at a different point in the process in different cultures.

For example, the relation between conflict and dissatisfaction may be weak in the early stages of conflict, but as the conflict progresses, the relation may become stronger; in other words, the process exhibits phases. Aligning the phases might reveal that a particular process is cross-culturally valid. To assess possible phase differences, we almost always require data at many points in time to create (by transformation) or to examine equilibrium among the variables of interest (by, e.g., dif­ferencing time-series data; see Hibbs, 1974). If the points in time are equally spaced but reveal cross-cultural differences, we may still be able to determine if the processes are the same (Coleman, 1968), assuming that the points are sufficiently frequent in time to avoid the prob­lem of a liasing, which arises because the data are not sampled at a sufficient number of time points (see MacKenzie, 2012, for a demonstra­tion of aliasing); Arundale (1980) applies this concept to communication.