Theory Cultural consensus theory assumes that cultural beliefs are learned and shared across people and that there is a common understanding of what the world and society are all about. Since the amount of information in a culture is too large for any one individual to master, individuals know different subsets of the cultural knowledge and vary in their cultural competence. Cultural beliefs are beliefs held by a majority of culture members. Given a set of questions, on the same topic, shared cultural beliefs or norms regarding the answers can be estimated by aggregating the responses across a sample of culture members. When  agreement is close to absolute, estimating answers is straightforward. The problem addressed by cultural consensus theory is how to estimate beliefs when there is some degree of heterogeneity present in responses. In general, cultural consensus theory provides a framework for determining whether responses are sufficiently homogeneous to estimate a single set of shared answers , and then estimating the answers and individual cultural competence in answering the questions. Cultural consensus models do not create consensus or explain why consensus exists; they simply facilitate the discovery and description of possible consensus. A high degree of agreement among raters must be present in responses in order to use consensus theory – only with high agreement does it make sense to aggregate responses to estimate beliefs of the group. Although there are statistical methods to evaluate whether agreement among raters is greater than chance (Binomial test, Friedman test, or Kendall’s coefficient of concordance), these methods do not provide a best estimate of the “true” answers nor do they estimate competence of the raters. Cultural consensus theory is able to estimate competence from the agreement between subjects and then, answers are estimated by “weighting” individual responses by competence prior to aggregation. A very important feature in the aggregation of responses is that the combined responses of individuals will be more accurate than the responses of each individual included in the aggregation. Reliability theory in psychology (specifically, the reliability coefficient and the Spearman–Brown prediction formula) provides a mathematical estimate of the accuracy or validity of aggregated responses from the number of units being combined and the level of agreement among the units. In this case,  accuracy of aggregated responses can be calculated from the number of subjects and the average Pearson correlation coefficient between all pairs of subjects (across questions). Competence Cultural competence is estimated from the similarity in responses between pairs of subjects since the agreement between a pair of respondents is a function of their individual competencies. In the formal model,  similarity is the probability that matched responses occur (match method. or the probability of particular response combinations occur (covariance method). Simple match or covariance measures are then corrected for guessing and the proportion of positive responses, respectively. In the informal model, similarity is calculated with a Pearson correlation coefficient. In summary, cultural consensus theory offers a framework for estimating cultural beliefs. A formal model is based on the decision-making process model of how questions are answered (with parameters for competence, response bias  and guessing). The model proceeds from axioms and uses mathematical proofs to arrive at estimates of competence and answers to a series of questions. The informal model is a set of statistical procedures that provides similar information. Given a series of related questions, the agreement between people’s reported answers is used to estimate their cultural competence. Cultural competence is how much an individual knows or shares group beliefs. Since the extraction of individual competencies depends upon having a single factor solution, the ratio of the first and second eigenvalues (> 3:1) serves as a goodness-of-fit indicator that a single factor is present in the pattern of responses. Culturally correct answers are estimated by weighting and combining individuals’ responses.
Theory Cultural consensus theory assumes that cultural beliefs are learned and shared across people and that there is a common understanding of what the world and society are all about. Since the amount of information in a culture is too large for any one individual to master, individuals know different subsets of the cultural knowledge and vary in their cultural competence. Cultural beliefs are beliefs held by a majority of culture members. Given a set of questions, on the same topic, shared cultural beliefs or norms regarding the answers can be estimated by aggregating the responses across a sample of culture members. When an agreement is close to absolute, estimating answers is straightforward. The problem addressed by cultural consensus theory is how to estimate beliefs when there is some degree of heterogeneity present in responses. In general, cultural consensus theory provides a framework for determining whether responses are sufficiently homogeneous to estimate a single set of shared answers and then estimating the answers and individual cultural competence in answering the questions. Cultural consensus models do not create consensus or explain why consensus exists; they simply facilitate the discovery and description of possible consensus. A high degree of agreement among raters must be present in responses to use consensus theory – only with high agreement does it make sense to aggregate responses to estimate beliefs of the group. Although there are statistical methods to evaluate whether agreement among raters is greater than chance (Binomial test, Friedman test, or Kendall’s coefficient of concordance), these methods do not provide a best estimate of the “true” answers nor do they estimate competence of the raters. Cultural consensus theory can estimate competence from the agreement between subjects and then, answers are estimated by “weighting” individual responses by competence prior to aggregation. A very important feature in the aggregation of responses is that the combined responses of individuals will be more accurate than the responses of each individual included in the aggregation. Reliability theory in psychology (specifically, the reliability coefficient and the Spearman–Brown prediction formula) provides a mathematical estimate of the accuracy or validity of aggregated responses from the number of units being combined and the level of agreement among the units. In this case, the accuracy of aggregated responses can be calculated from the number of subjects and the average Pearson correlation coefficient between all pairs of subjects (across questions). Competence Cultural competence is estimated from the similarity in responses between pairs of subjects since the agreement between a pair of respondents is a function of their individual competencies. In the formal model, the similarity is the probability that matched responses occur (match method. or the probability of particular response combinations occur (covariance method). Simple match or covariance measures are then corrected for guessing and the proportion of positive responses, respectively. In the informal model, similarity is calculated with a Pearson correlation coefficient. In summary, cultural consensus theory offers a framework for estimating cultural beliefs. A formal model is based on the decision-making process model of how questions are answered (with parameters for competence, response bias , and guessing). The model proceeds from axioms and uses mathematical proofs to arrive at estimates of competence and answers to a series of questions. The informal model is a set of statistical procedures that provides similar information. Given a series of related questions, the agreement between people’s reported answers is used to estimate their cultural competence. Cultural competence is how much an individual knows or shares group beliefs. Since the extraction of individual competencies depends upon having a single factor solution, the ratio of the first and second eigenvalues (> 3:1) serves as a goodness-of-fit indicator that a single factor is present in the pattern of responses. Culturally correct answers are estimated by weighting and combining individuals’ responses.
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