Cultural Network Analysis

Cultural Network Analysis (CNA) is a method for modeling culture as networks of ideas that are distributed among members of a population. The method represents an interdisciplinary synthesis of techniques drawn from the fields of cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, human decision making, and decision analysis. CNA is used to develop cultural models for groups and populations, typically depicted as a network representation of the culturally-shared concepts, causal beliefs, and values that influence key decisions. CNA can be usefully employed for a variety of applications, including developing cultural training programs, characterizing the thinking of audiences to support cross-cultural communications campaigns, and facilitating the development of hybrid team cultures in multinational collaborations.
The Cognitive View of Culture
Within cognitive anthropology, culture is typically defined as involving shared knowledge. People typically use the word idea to refer to any content of the mind, including conceptions of how things are and of how things should be. Networks of ideas are often referred to as folk theories or mental models. Such networks constitute peoples’ explanations for how things work, and result in judgments and decisions that influence their behavior.
Mental models can spread widely throughout a population and persist for long time periods, becoming “cultural” in the sense of being shared by many of its members across space and time. Cultural models are created by an analyst to graphically represent these shared networks of ideas.
A cultural group refers to a set of people that hold shared networks of ideas, whereas a social group consists of people who interact with one another. Modern social groups may be best defined and described using tools such as social network analysis. Similarly, cultural groups are defined and described using cultural network analysis.
CNA Process
CNA is a method for building external cultural models that have been extracted from a group, organization, or society. CNA includes specific techniques to:
*collect relevant cognitive information from a sample of individuals within a population
*extract elements of mental models from the body of information
*analyze the mental models in terms of their culturally-shared elements across individuals
*represent the cultural models in accessible format for a variety of uses
Cultural Network Analysis encompasses both qualitative, exploratory analysis, and quantitative, confirmatory analysis. The specific techniques used to achieve each step in the analysis depend on whether the cultural analyst is employing exploratory CNA or confirmatory CNA.
Exploratory CNA
In exploratory CNA, concepts and other mental model elements are extracted from qualitative sources, such as interviews and open source media (web news, blogs, email), with little presupposition regarding the elicited contents. A primary goal of exploratory CNA is to develop an initial understanding of the concepts and characteristics that are culturally relevant within the domain. Qualitative analysis and representation at this stage yield insights that can be captured in initial cultural models. The influence diagram is an important representation format for cultural models. Exploratory CNA may be all that is needed for some applications. Exploratory CNA also generates hypotheses and a wealth of material for constructing structured data collection in a confirmatory CNA.
Confirmatory CNA
Confirmatory CNA serves to test the structure of previously developed qualitative cultural models, as well as to elaborate the models with quantitative data concerning the prevalence of ideas in the population(s) of interest. In confirmatory CNA, structured interviews, field experiments, and automated semantic mining of web-based sources are used to obtain systematic data that is more amenable to statistical analysis. Statistical models used by cognitive anthropologists and market researchers, such as Cultural Consensus Theory and Mixture model techniques, are employed to assess the patterns of agreement and derive statistics describing the distribution of concepts, causal beliefs, and values. Finally, influence diagram representations of the cultural models are constructed that illustrate the statistical properties, as well as the qualitative information. Formal quantitative representation makes it possible to use cultural models for rigorous modeling and simulation applications.

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