Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called
holocultural studies or
comparative studies, is a specialization in
anthropology and sister sciences (
sociology,
psychology,
economics,
political science) that uses field data from many
societies to examine the scope of
human behavior and test hypotheses about human behavior and culture. Cross-cultural studies is the third form of cross-cultural comparisons. The first is comparison of case studies, the second is controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation, and the third is comparison within a sample of cases. Unlike comparative studies, which examines similar characteristics of a few societies, cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample so that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack of relationships between the traits in question. These studies are surveys of
ethnographic data.