Correlation Analysis between Cultural Context Level and Education/Culture/Geography/Society -Related Parameters in Twenty-six Countries

Abstract

∗It is very important to keep investigations on the novel feature and law of cross-culture communication so as to consolidate the reasonability and necessity of cultural diversity around the world, thus decreasing the possibility of cultural conflict by intercultural communication and education. The upcoming big data era provides great chance for novel findings in many old questions in the field of social science. High/low cultural context (cuco) is a key concept in cross-culture area, and its formation mechanism remains obscure and waits for systematic renew. It is possible to obtain more findings if large-scale multi-layer data are employed in the study of cultural context formation mechanism. As a preliminary endeavor toward this direction, this study conducted correlation analysis on twenty-nine culture/education parameters and thirty-three geography/society parameters from twenty-six representative countries, and found several factors that positively or negatively correlate with cultural context. The strongest positive one is PDI (power distance). Interestingly, two basic linguistic factors, alph (alphabet of the country’s main language) and cnso (consonants of the country’s main language), have slightly positive correlation with cuco, while another linguistic factor, vowe (vowels of the country’s main language), has a negative correlation with cultural context. The strongest negative correlation is InCo (individualism vs collectivism), suggesting that PDI and InCo may be two most relevant cultural factors that influence cultural context parameter. Meanwhile, ethnic diversity and high developmental level would bring positive and negative effects on cultural context value, respectively.