International Resources

• SPSP International Travel/Registration Award: For many international researchers, the location of the SPSP Annual Convention often puts attendance out of reach. This award is an effort to offset this impact. 
• SPSP International Bridge-Building Award: SPSP seeks researchers from around the world to participate in its activities. The goal of this award is to serve as an incubator for testing creative ideas that would help build connections and communication across the world.
• PSPR Editorial Fellowship Program: A 2022 pilot program from the Personality and Social Psychology Review seeks to expand the international and disciplinary diversity of their editorial team, and provide an entry point for scholars from underrepresented world regions and with indigenous perspectives. The fellowship comes with a USD $2,500 stipend and collaborative training with the current editorial board.
• SPSP offers reduced membership and convention registration fees for individuals based in low and middle-income countries.  As of 2023, attendees can register for dramatically reduced fees: $100 (all-access) / $50 (virtual) for the main convention and $25 for preconferences.

• SPSP 2021: Professional Development Workshop on Conducting Social Psychological Research in non-WEIRD settings
• SPSP 2021: Journal Editors Discuss Diversity in Publishing
• IACCP 2022: Editors from three SPSP journals (PSPB, PSPR, and SPPS) presented as an "Editors Panel: Publishing in SPSP journals to Increase Geographical Diversity in our Science" 
• SPSP 2023: Professional Development session, "Being Multicultural Academics: Challenges and Opportunities of International Academic Careers" 

• The Global Academic Careers Guide: Essential Advice and Top Tips for Academics Looking to Expand Their Horizons Overseas
• SPSP has a collection of resources for international students interested in working or studying in the United States, and U.S. students interested in working or studying abroad.

Want to expand your horizons and database? Looking for local collaborators? Consider connecting with these social and personality psychology organizations in other world regions and organizations with an international focus:

• International Union of Psychological Science, founded in 1889
• Interamerican Psychological Society, founded in 1951
• International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology, founded in 1972
• European Association of Personality Psychology, founded in 1984
• European Association of Social Psychology, founded in 1967
• International Academy for Intercultural Research, founded in 1997
• World Association for Personality Psychology, founded in 2009
• Asian Association of Social Psychology, founded in 1995
• Society of Australasian Social Psychologists, formally founded in 1994
• International Networks and Databases, from the APA Office of International Affairs

Why more global diversity is necessary for psychological science:

• Psychology has been culture blind
• Culture and psychology “make each other up” and cognitive processes are shaped by the cultural context
• Psychology has focused on people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies
• Psychology might benefit from becoming a historical science
• Models, measures, and theories in psychology rest almost exclusively on samples/authors from the United States
• Inequity and coloniality in international social psychological publication
• Evidence of global disparities of knowledge production in the social and behavioral sciences; archival evidence of USA-centrism in social psychology publications; structural disparities in leading social psychology journals based on an analysis of mentions of a sample’s country of origin
• Limits of gender and regional diversity in the European Association of Social Psychology
• Three-part series on the APS Observer titled “Psychological Science Needs the Entire Globe”, talks about the problems of north American dominance, legacies of colonization, and how this problem is relevant for the survival of psychology (and whether it deserves psychological science researchers across the globe)

Examples of articles specific to certain underrepresented regions and communities:

• An article detailing the status of Arabic social psychology
• Psychology within and without a state discusses what small-scale societies can tell us about human psychological diversity, their neglect by the psychological literature, and best practices of psychological research in these communities
• Article discussing how social psychological theorizing on prejudice and discrimination falls short of capturing the nature of prejudice and discrimination directed toward Native Americans
• Article on the psychology of indigenous people and shared social psychological consequences of colonization

In addition to involving local collaborators, how else can you expand your database? What should you know about methods for cross-cultural and cultural research?

Global Publicly-Available Databases

• World Values Survey is a database of values, beliefs, and preferences from representative national surveys across over 50 countries collected in 6 waves over time
• Afrobarometer: a pan-African series of national public attitude surveys (publicly available data)
• Arab Barometer: a pan-Arab series of national public attitude surveys (publicly available data)
• Arab Opinion Index: a pan-Arab series of national public attitude surveys (data not publicly available but reports on the data that help for understanding the Arab region are)
• European Social Survey is a database of values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in participating European countries
• Human Relations Area Files provides quantified ethnographic data from many traditional human societies
• Database of Religious History and SESHAT are both publically available and evolving databases of religious and cultural diversity throughout time

Research Methods

Data analysis presents new challenges and opportunities when collected from international samples. Recommended perspectives: 

• Edited books on research methods for cross-cultural and cultural research: three different perspectives
• Easy articles detailing measurement issues when conducting research across cultures – see one example here and another here
• Ron Fischer’s website has useful material, including an examination of factor structure consistency in cross-cultural samples
• Maksim Rudnev’s website has useful methodological tips, including testing for the equivalence of psychological measures across groups

How Diverse Is My Sample? 

• An empirical approach to measure cultural distance, with publicly available code
• A tool to measure the “WEIRDness” of samples (based on country of origin) created by Muthukrishna et al with publicly available code

Want to highlight research with an international or cultural focus? Peruse these journals:  

• Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
• International Journal of Personality Psychology
• International Journal of Psychology
• International Perspectives in Psychology
• International Journal of Intercultural Relations
• Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology 
• Culture & Psychology
• Cross-Cultural Research
• Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology