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Cultural consensus theory supports a framework for the measurement and evaluation of beliefs as cultural; shared to some extent by a group of individuals. Cultural consensus models guide the aggregation of responses from individuals to estimate (1) the culturally appropriate answers to a series of related questions (when the answers are unknown) and (2) individual competence (cultural competence) in answering those questions. The theory is applicable when there is sufficient agreement across people to assume that a single set of answers exists. The agreement between pairs of individuals is used to estimate individual cultural competence. Answers are estimated by weighting responses of individuals by their competence and then combining responses. Cultural consensus theory assumes that cultural beliefs are learned and shared across people. 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). ==Usage== To use cultural consensus theory, at least three assumptions must be met: # Informants must be asked a series of questions. The questions should all be on the same topic and at the same level of difficulty. This assumption concerns the homogeneity of items and means that items should represent only one topic or domain of knowledge and that competency should be consistent across items, so that if someone does well on one subset of questions, they should also do well on another subset of questions. Responses to questions are not corrected, recoded, transformed, or reflected as they are with knowledge tests and attitudinal scales because the purpose is to use the original responses to estimate culturally correct answers. # Each informant should provide answers independently of all other informants. This means that answers should be provided by individuals and not groups, and without consultation with others. Consensus models are not appropriate for group interviews. # The cultural consensus model is applicable only if there is a single set of answers to the questions. This means that there must be a high level of consistency (agreement) in responses among informants. An aggregation of responses is not a valid estimate unless there is reasonable consistency in the underlying data. An initial step in applying consensus theory is to check whether there is a high degree of agreement among the informants (e.g., to verify that there is only one response pattern present). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cultural consensus theory」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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