Responding to Adverse Situations within Exchange Relationships : The Cross-Cultural Validity of a Circumplex Model

When faced with adverse situations in exchange relationships, the people involved are required to respond. Response strategies are reactions to such adverse situations and represent an integrated structure organized in people's psyches. Extant response strategy research implicitly assumes that the content and internal structure of response strategies may be universal, but with few exceptions, it fails to assess cross-cultural validity, a necessary step to investigate cultural variations in response strategy preference. This study investigated the cross-cultural validity of a circumplex model in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, and Japan. The seven response strategies examined have measurement equivalence and are organized in a similar circumplex structure in the four countries. The findings also revealed cross-cultural differences in people's preference to use response strategies. This study therefore contributes to cross-cultural psychology literature by demonstrating that response strategy content and structure are nearly universal, whereas preferences for using response strategy vary across cultures