The promise of the cross-cultural approach psychology is the scientific study of human behavior. Its presumptive goal is to achieve universal status by generalizing results found in particular ecological. social, legal, institutional, and political settings. Such generalization requires testing in maximally different cultures. "In no other way can we be certain that what we believe to be regularities are not merely peculiarities, the product of some limited set of historical or cultural or political circumstances" (Kohn 1987). Tests for generalizability often produce extensive discrepancies (Amir & Sharon 1987). Of course, these discrepancies can arise because of differences in testing methods. "To obviate the possibility that differences in findings are merely artifacts of differences in method, one tries to design studies to be comparable with one another in their methods, to establish both linguistic and conceptual equivalence in the wording of questions and in the coding of answers, and to establish truly equivalent indices of the underlying concepts" (Kohn 1987). This requirement is no mean challenge, and early, obvious failures have left cross-cultural psychology with a dubious legacy. Today, however, psychologists show greater vigilance and sophistication about the equivalence issue (van de Vijver & Leung 1996). Consequently, we may feel more confident about the validity of differences found across cultural settings. Teachers meet with unwanted behavior when they are acting as facilitators of the learning process and they resort to certain tactics to deal with them. One of these tactics is punishment. This study aimed to identify the views held by Turkish primary school pupils on punishment. According to the results of the study, pupils were punished for different reasons by their teachers, who used different types of punishment in response to this unwanted behavior. Not being able to accept the situation, pupils experienced negative emotions toward the teacher and the lesson. Some of the punitive methods applied changed pupil behavior, some did not. Pupils expected different reactions in place of ineffective teacher punishments.

Key words: Organisational psychology, purnishment, Turkish primary school.

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