8 Mapping social love: Insights from a global cluster analysis

Studying a sociological phenomenon through a trans-national comparison can bring (also) to build a global map. Choosing Countries as analysis units undoubtedly has advantages in terms of the synthetic and systematic representation they allow, but it also could hide pitfalls that we need to be aware of. Different Nations could have different levels of internal homogeneity in relation to their social conditions and cultural systems of reference. Consequently, data at a national level always have to be thought as "averages" which can hide more or less significant internal differences. Taking into account this aspect for results understanding and interpretation, in the chapter we will illustrate and analyze the distribution of Countries in the “sociological space” identified by the constitutive dimensions of social love, with the aim of highlighting groupings and distances between countries and comparing this output with maps produced by other social and/or economic dimensions.