Cross-National Research Methodology and Practice

Linda Hantrais, Steen Mangen, Linda Hantrais, Steen Mangen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317997436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cross-National Research Methodology and Practice offers practical guidance for relative newcomers to cross-national research by analysing and evaluating the research process by focusing strongly on best practice in terms of methods and management. It raises a number of important issues for cross-national research which have been given insufficient attention in discussions of methods and practice.

The volume contains reflexive and theoretically based pieces on the development of contextualization as an approach to cross-national comparative research, on qualitative and quantitative methods, extending to the integration of different methodological approaches.

The volume includes practical examples of cross-national research projects which illustrate different methods ranging from:

• biographical and documentary approaches
• the collection and analysis of socio-demographic and attitudinal survey data either carried out by lone researchers or teams of researchers
• the exploration of internet sources and application of computer analysis to quantitative and qualitative data.

This collection provides a firm emphasis on methodological issues relating to context, values and discourse.

Preface

Cross-National Research

LINDA HANTRAIS and STEEN MANGEN

 

Discussion about cross-national social research methods has centred on at least three fundamental considerations. A long-standing debate has revolved around the question of whether cross-national social research constitutes a legitimated set of methods in its own right, or is merely a manifestation of more general issues arising in the field. Genericists have insisted that, despite specific constraints in operationalizing methods in international settings, there are no distinct cross-national methods per se. Others advance the argument that paramount problems to do with language, space and culture are sufficient to justify particularism as a research entity.

A second facet relates to the competing objectives of cross-national investigation. Much of the officially sponsored policy research is primarily dictated by pressures to extract ‘lessons from the homeland’. Only in more recent times has a more robust scientific agenda been established with attempts to construct reasonably well-defined models and, in limited cases, to test theory. Often, effort has been handicapped by methodology which restricts samples to very narrow ‘most similar’ countries, and which imposes too brief a time scale to disentangle the social, cultural, economic and political variables. To these must be added the tendency in quantitative comparative research for over-reliance on highly-aggregated data, which exposes the researcher to the dangers of a large degree of multicolinearity.

Finally, frustrations are ever present in reaching effective management of projects, leading to the colonialization of methods, dominance of research approaches and, leadership by particular academic and national traditions.

For these reasons, much of the literature on the cross-national comparative research process tends to give precedence to thematic content and findings rather than focusing on the theory and practice of the research. The growing interest in cross-national comparisons within the social sciences since the 1970s has not, therefore, been matched by commensurate advances at the theoretical and practical level. As a result, the material collected in international projects is often not directly comparable, and the findings reported to sponsors may be biased or misleading.

The aim of Cross-National Research Methodology & Practice is to contribute to the theoretical basis of research that crosses national boundaries and to offer practical guidance for relative newcomers to cross-national research by analysing and evaluating the research process. The contributions include reflexive and theoretically-based pieces on the development of contextualization as an approach to cross-national comparative research, on qualitative and quantitative methods, extending to the integration of different methodological approaches. Shorter articles exemplify the practice of carrying out cross-national comparisons, focusing again on analysis of the research process. All the papers provide practical examples from cross-national research projects, illustrating different methods which range from biographical and documentary approaches, the collection and analysis of socio-demographic and attitudinal survey data, whether carried out by lone researchers or teams, the exploration of internet sources, and application of computer analysis to quantitative and qualitative data. A theme common to three of the shorter papers is the study of migration. They raise a number of important issues for cross-national research that have not, hitherto, been given sufficient attention in discussions of methods and practice.

Contextualization in cross-national comparative research

LINDA HANTRAIS

Introduction

The many definitions of cross-national comparative research in the social sciences have in common their concern to observe social phenomena across nations, to develop robust explanations of similarities or differences, and to attempt to assess their consequences, whether it be for the purposes of testing theories, drawing lessons about best practice or, more straightforwardly, gaining a better understanding of how social processes operate. Much of the comparative research undertaken in the early postwar period, particularly the large-scale studies carried out by political scientists in the USA, aimed to produce generalizations from the US experience, assuming them to be universally applicable. At the other extreme, proponents of culturalist explanation upheld that social reality could only be properly understood within the context in which it occurs, and that all findings are conditioned by spatial and temporal factors, and are not, therefore, amenable to generalization. In attempting to reconcile these two conflicting approaches, another body of cross-national comparative research has sought to identify general factors within social systems that can be interpreted with reference to specific societal contexts.

Contextualization is central to all three of these approaches. In the first case, social reality is considered to be context free; in the second, it is context bound, and the context is an object of study in its own right; in the third, social reality is also context dependent, but the context itself serves as an important explanatory variable and an enabling tool, rather than constituting a barrier to effective cross-national comparisons.

This paper explores the growing interest among social scientists in issues surrounding contextualization as a major component in cross-national comparative studies. It argues that an in-depth understanding of the socio-cultural, economic and political contexts in which social phenomena develop is a precondition for successful cross-national comparative research. It addresses a number of methodological questions, arising in research that crosses national boundaries. Firstly, how to justify adopting the nation as the contextual framework; how to select and delimit contextual factors; how to identify the most appropriate research paradigms; how to take account of culturally determined research conventions; how to deal with conceptual equivalence in different cultural and linguistic settings; and how to integrate contextual factors when interpreting and evaluating findings. Reference is made to examples from multinational and interdisciplinary projects, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, to illustrate how these issues have been tackled and resolved, and to identify best practice.

From context-free to context-bounded research

The comparative method has a long pedigree in the social sciences. It was used by the founders of modern sociology, Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, to establish models of social evolution. John Stuart Mill provided an early systematized account of the comparative method, which was subsequently adopted by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim in their observations of industrial capitalism, the division of labour, religion and other social processes.

Universalist approaches

The search for constant factors or general laws capable of explaining social phenomena, as advocated by the early sociologists, underpinned much of the international comparative research undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. It was grounded in the assumption that universal characteristics could be identified in social phenomena, independently from a specific context. For Dogan and Pelassy (1990: 19), in comparative politics, ‘the very spirit of comparison involves the quest for universals’. This is because universalist theory was culture or context free, ‘landless’ theory according to Rose (1991: 446), also with reference to political science. It followed that generalizations could be made from the observation of social processes in a given society, culture or nation. One of the conclusions drawn on the basis of this type of research was that industrial societies would undergo the same evolutionary process and ultimately converge (Wilensky and Lebeaux 1958). The notion of culture-free contexts was applied in the study of organizations in the 1970s to argue for a scientifically determined ‘one best way’ in organizational management, as critiqued by Rose (1985). In the field of social policy, attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to explain the crisis of welfare (Mishra 1984), to classify welfare states (Esping-Andersen 1990) and to predict the future of welfare in the context of economic integration and globalization (Esping-Andersen 1996) were part of the search for normative models from which generalizations could be made. The universalist approach has also served as a basic tenet in many econometric studies aimed at modelling behaviour, at times with seemingly little regard for social reality (Allsopp 1995).

The universalist approach to cross-national comparison, with its emphasis on the search for similarity and convergence, often as a means of testing the wider applicability of a theory developed at national level, can thus be criticized for ignoring specific contexts and for treating cultural factors as exogenous variables. Studies based on universalist theory have also been reproached for drawing what may be ill-founded inferences about causality at individual level by deduction or extrapolation from relationships established between variables at aggregate level. Indeed, researchers may fall into the trap of ‘ecological’ or ‘wrong level fallacy’, identified by US sociologists many decades ago (Robinson 1951, Riley 1963), whereby the wrong conclusions about causality are drawn because the wrong level of inference is being used.

Culturalist approaches

While large-scale comparative research was engaged in tracking and mapping the development of socio-political and economic phenomena across the world, a very different approach was being pursued in another body of research, with the focus on national uniqueness and particularism, and cross-cultural contrasts or differences. For proponents of culture-boundedness or relativism, contextualization was at the nexus of comparative research, and the existence of truly universal concepts and values was rejected. Culturalism, as developed initially by the Chicago School from observation of cultural diversity in the urban environment in the 1920s and 1930s, placed such great emphasis on social contexts and their specificity, distinctiveness or uniqueness, that meaningful comparisons and generalizations were made very difficult, if not impossible. Culturalism drew heavily on ethnographic accounts to illustrate diversity and divergence rather than similarity and convergence. Taken to the extreme by ethnomethodologists, such as Garfinkel in the 1960s, social reality was seen as a ‘rational accomplishment’ of individuals. Claims that generalizations could be made on the basis of individual accounts have not received much credence in the sociological literature, and the potential for transporting concepts and values identified as being peculiar to a particular society into another cultural or linguistic community would seem to be limited.

Societal approaches

To overcome the obstacles to effective comparative research associated with universalism and culturalism, many intermediate positions have been adopted. In the 1960s, the neo-evolutionists, among them Parsons, developed a theory that took account of the efficiency of different societies in adapting to evolutionary advances. Such an approach allowed limited comparisons to be made of subsets of societies at different stages in the process of development. In their search for a compromise position, Przeworski and Teune (1970: 12) expressed the view that general theories can be formulated if it is recognized that ‘social phenomena are not only diverse but always occur in mutually interdependent and interacting structures, possessing a spatiotemporal location. If stable, these patterns of interaction can be treated as systems’. By treating social phenomena as components of systems, it follows that explanations of behaviour must be examined with reference to factors intrinsic to the system in question. The two authors argue, however, that the conclusion should not be drawn that systems are unique; part of the explanation for social reality may be found in factors extrinsic to the system, enabling more general or universal factors to be identified.

In moving away from the universalist approach in the study of organizations, Lammers and Hickson (1979: 403) identified three ways in which an organization could be affected (or culturally bound) by the cultural patterns prevailing in its social environment. Firstly, political and legal agencies prescribe and proscribe certain procedures and provisions, which in turn affect the values espoused by the organization, its suppliers and customers. Secondly, dominant elites within the organization design and redesign its structure in line with culturally-embedded norms and practices. Thirdly, members of organizations import values, norms and roles from external subcultures, such as family, education, community, peer group, influencing how they organize internally. In demonstrating how organizations are culture bound, the analysis was intended to identify and explain distinctiveness by investigating the interplay between organizations and their societal settings. Comparative research into industrial relations, and more especially trade unions, has also recognized the value of analysing nationally-specific institutional frameworks as generators of norms, practices and mutual expectations, but with the proviso that trade union movements are so culturally specific that they are, essentially, ‘non-comparable’ (Hyman 1998: 57).

Maurice (1989) of the Aix group is generally attributed with having further articulated and applied what has come to be known as the ‘societal’ approach in the study of organizations. From the late 1960s, he and his colleagues were also trying to steer a course between the extremes of universalism and culturalism. They argued that all international comparisons aim to demonstrate the effect of the national context on the object of study, but with the purpose of determining the extent to which generalizations can be made from the theoretical models and hypotheses that the researcher is seeking to test empirically. Therefore, they rejected any form of analysis which directly compared ‘equivalent’ terms (like with like). Instead, stress was laid on the importance of analysing the relationship between the macro and the micro, implying an interaction between a plurality of causal factors, on the grounds that actors cannot be separated from structures and vice versa, since they are all socially constructed. According to this line of argument, comparisons are made possible by the fact that each unit of observation has a systemic coherence and is part of a process, rooted in national specificity. It follows that the globalization of technology does not, for example, eliminate the diversity of social forms, but nor does it prevent generalizations.

The conclusion to be drawn from this analysis of the main approaches adopted in cross-national comparisons is that researchers embarking on comparative studies would be well advised to avoid the extremes of universalism and culturalism. If their aim is to observe social phenomena across nations, develop robust explanations of similarities or differences, and attempt to assess the consequences, they could usefully combine the strong points contained ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Cross-National Research—Linda Hantrais and Steen Mangen
• 2 Contextualization in cross-national comparative research—Linda Hantrais
• 3 Qualitative research methods in cross-national settings—Steen Mangen
• 4 In pursuit of quality: issues for cross-national survey research—Janet Harkness
• 5 Concepts, context and discourse in a comparative case study—Emma Carmel
• 6 Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods in the study of international migration—Ann Singleton
• 7 Cross-national qualitative research: accommodating ideals and reality—Monika Zulauf
• 8 Context, culture and values in migration research on children within the European Union—Louise Ackers
• Index