A practical guide to cross-cultural and multi-sited data collection in the biological and behavioural sciences

Data accessibility: This article has no additional data. The project materials and data used in specific analyses can be found on the Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/mztep/.Electronic supplementary material is available online: Spake L et al. 2024 A practical guide to cross-cultural and multi-sited data collection in the biological and behavioural sciences. Figshare. (https://doi:org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.7165766).Declaration of AI use: We have not used AI-assisted technologies in creating this article.Researchers in the biological and behavioural sciences are increasingly conducting collaborative, multi-sited projects to address how phenomena vary across ecologies. These types of projects, however, pose additional workflow challenges beyond those typically encountered in single-sited projects. Through specific attention to cross-cultural research projects, we highlight four key aspects of multi-sited projects that must be considered during the design phase to ensure success: (1) project and team management; (2) protocol and instrument development; (3) data management and documentation; and (4) equitable and collaborative practices. Our recommendations are supported by examples from our experiences collaborating on the Evolutionary Demography of Religion project, a mixed-methods project collecting data across five countries in collaboration with research partners in each host country. To existing discourse, we contribute new recommendations around team and project management, introduce practical recommendations for exploring the validity of instruments through qualitative techniques during piloting, highlight the importance of good documentation at all steps of the project, and demonstrate how data management workflows can be strengthened through open science practices. While this project was rooted in cross-cultural human behavioural ecology and evolutionary anthropology, lessons learned from this project are applicable to multi-sited research across the biological and behavioural sciences.John Templeton Foundation (grant nos. 61425, 62773); Templeton Religion Trust (grant no. TRT-2022-30378)