Ethics, Ethnocentrism and Social Science Research

Divya Sharma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000282733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Rechtstheorie & -praxis

This book addresses the ethical and methodological issues that researchers face while conducting cross-cultural social research.

With globalization and advanced means of communication and transportation, many researchers conduct research in cross-cultural, multicultural, and transnational settings. Through a range of case studies, and drawing on a range of disciplinary expertise, this book addresses the ethics, errors, and ethnocentrism of conducting law and crime related research in settings where power differences, as well as stereotypes, may come into play. Including chapters from scholars across cultures and settings – including Greece, Canada, Vienna, South Africa, India, and the United States – this book provides an invaluable survey of the issues attending cross-cultural social justice research today.

Engaging issues confronted by all cross-cultural researchers this book will be invaluable to those working across the social sciences as well as professionals in criminal justice and social work.

Chapter 1

Ethics and generalizability in qualitative research

Collecting data from refugees and forced migrants, a case study

Divya Sharma

Introduction

Qualitative research has been an essential part of criminology, victimology, and penology. It presents meaningful insight into events and processes from the perspective of the people that shape and influence them and vice versa. Using qualitative methods in cross-cultural and multicultural settings present many methodological and ethical challenges. This chapter examines some of these challenges while using data collection from refugees in Jodhpur, India, as a case study. It begins with a brief literature review of the key topics in qualitative research. It also includes a short discussion on the growing concern about uncritical acceptance of news and social media narratives by scholars in the field of crime, justice, and victimization, and the related ideological pitfalls, biases, and stereotypes that could potentially impair the academic space in criminology and criminal justice. It is followed by a description of push factors that have forced refugee migration from Pakistan to India and then explains the setting where the data was collected. Thereafter, it examines ethical dilemmas about intensive interviews and focus groups, while collecting data about violence, displacement, trauma, and loss. It concludes with a discussion on reliability and generalizability in qualitative research.

Literature review

Qualitative research is contextual research that provides an in-depth understanding of setting, people, and processes. It is particularly useful while using the exploratory approach. In their study of Vietnamese refugees, Haines, Rutherford, and Thomas (1981) observed that “exploratory fieldwork approach furnishes useful conceptual contributions to the more general field of refugee studies” (p. 98). It helps explain the framework within which various behaviors, attitudes, causal relations, and perceptions are shaped. It reveals the individual and subjective nature of information (Heyink and Tymstra, 1993; Jones, 2004) that may be unique to each individual. As a result, there is limited generalizability. Nonetheless, the knowledge that it provides cannot be accessed as easily through other means. For many cross-cultural and transnational topics in victimology, the inductive approach of data collection and production of knowledge may be the only possible starting points. Hence, grounded theory rooted in data becomes a significant part of research (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). However, even the inductive research of developing grounded theory may lead to revising and developing general hypotheses that can be then tested, making it resemble deductive research (Ambert, Adler, Adler, and Detzner, 1995; Bogdan and Biklen, 1992; Campbell, 1979).

With an increase in global mobility among researchers, sometimes the findings based on small sample sizes and non-probability methods are presented without any caveat about their generalizability. Qualitative methods often help in giving a face to a story. That very fact may raise concerns about objectivity being lost in analyzing and presenting such findings. However, at times, researchers and policymakers need to cater to human emotion to convey that people affected by issues of crime and justice are more than mere statistics. They live in complex, multiple overlapping, and shared realities (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) that can be explained a lot better by using qualitative research. According to Blumer (1969), these realities are not static; there is a continuous process of interaction and interpretation. That is, social behaviors and systems evolve, and the researchers must be mindful of the period in which they are collecting and interpreting data. It necessitates dating qualitative data, especially if used in policymaking as some of the populations are transient and many issues evolve. It is true for the quantitative methods as well, but it needs a closer analysis of qualitative methods due to the exploratory, individual, and subjective approach.

A growing concern with qualitative research is that of helicopter researchers that access complex, multicultural, and cross-cultural settings one time only. They fly in and out of settings, take data, leave, and give nothing back (Struthers, Lauderdale, Nichols, Tom-Orme, and Strickland, 2005). Their access to a setting is also impacted by religious, cultural, economic, and linguistic factors. That is, their access is determined and defined by the local contacts that may present a filtered view. Concerning measurement reliability, it is important not to be consistently wrong. While presenting findings, these concerns should be spelled out. Some researchers almost romanticize with the findings in their description, analysis, and presentation that may include the use of props.¹ These dramatized presentations at times become the focal point of how the findings are consumed and minimize the significance of the topic and critical scrutiny of the findings. In his study on extreme violence and suicide terrorism, Thrift (2007) notes that news is increasingly presented in conflation with entertainment at a local and global level.

Orientalism, ethnocentrism, errors, and gaps in information

While researching in cross-cultural settings, it is important to guard against orientalism, cultural appropriation, and preset biases. Some studies (Clarke, 1997; Erchak, 1992) have noted that it is not uncommon for many in the West or Europe to have a self-image of superiority, while having a stereotypical understanding of the East, even viewing it as inferior (Rosen, 2000). For example, since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, many researchers have started to study informal banking systems that allow people to transfer money either without going through formal banks, without following formal procedures, or both. Many such systems have existed around the world and even predate the Western banking systems. Some of the more commonly known systems are Hundi² in the Indian subcontinent, Hawala³ in South Asia and the Middle East, Undiyal in Sri Lanka, and fei ch’ien in China, casa de cambio (stash house), phoe kuan (message houses), Chop Shop, and Chits, etc. (Sharma, 2008; Sharma, 2006). In her research on Hawala, Edwina Thompson (2007) states that there is “the tendency in current Indian literature on hawala to dissociate local financial practices there from those that are tainted with the brush of terrorism in neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan” (p. 289). The passage that Thompson refers to explains Hawala practices in India before the 1940s, while Pakistan was created in 1947: she overlooks a simple historical fact and attributes that there must be country-related bias. Additionally, over time, many Hawala practices in India have served the same purpose as the Hundis did for hundreds of years. The work that Thompson refers to contains interviews with Hawala brokers in India, not the Middle East, Pakistan, or Afghanistan. While many may use Hawala as part of the Islamic banking system, many Hawala brokers brokers in India have nothing to do with Islam or Islamic banking system; that is, many non-Muslims also use it and and use the use the terms Hawala and Hundi interchangeably. Thompson overlooks these historical and cultural factors and assigns bias to “current Indian literature.” Any investigator, police officer, scholar, or researcher from that part of the world would have shared this information, had Thompson approached the topic perhaps without preconceived notions about India and Pakistan, or worse, Hindus and Muslims. She repeats the same assumption about Indian researchers in another article in 2008 (Thompson, 2008) while citing the same material. It is only one example of misconstrued realities and should not be overgeneralized to reflect upon the majority of researchers working in cross-cultural, multicultural, and transnational settings. However, it highlights the need to conduct closer scrutiny of research in diverse settings, especially as some research works are difficult to replicate.

Whether it is a genuine misunderstanding about the larger context, naiveté about India or Pakistan, or an example of inherent bias, it highlights the problem of creating facts by repetition. It also underlines the problem of looking at India and Pakistan in perpetually conflictual and religious terms, while almost bullying non-Western researchers to subscribe to a Eurocentric perspective. It is a reductionist approach that makes qualitative research come across as crude and unscientific. It also takes away from the seriousness of the problem that leads to either no policy response or poor policy response.

While using qualitative methods, it is all the more important to understand historical, cultural, and religious contexts, and not give in to sensationalism and rigid schemata. The audience that is served these works through journal articles, books, or conferences has few options for authenticating these accounts. With the globalization of information, such errors in the news media are somewhat easy to identify, but the relative insularity of the academic community gives certain faulty or biased narratives a longer shelf-life. The motivation of such an approach can be anyone’s guess, but academically, the creation of facts by repetition and tautological errors pose hurdles when trying to conduct a fact-based analysis of topics of crime, justice, and victimization.

In another instance, Qadri (2017), writing for the New York Times attempted to relate the use of saree (commonly worn by women all across South Asia) with Hindu nationalism, because of the right-wing party that came to power in India in the 2014 elections. It is a seemingly harmless, nonetheless, faulty assumption and reflects a certain phobia in mainstream media. Journalists, including left-wing and those highly censorious of the Indian government, as well as many voices from the Muslim-majority countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and so on, were equally critical of such assumptions about sarees (Dutt, 2017; “Love for sarees,” 2017). It reflects a troubling approach of not only assigning caste and religion in spaces where they did not exist but also perhaps befouling these spaces going forward.

India faces problems rooted in caste and religion, but to assign everything to these factors is, at the very least, intellectually dishonest and generally lethargic. For example, various Indian governments have taken steps to identify money laundering through shell companies and bogus organizations, and have transparency about the source of funding that various non-government and religious organizations receive in India; many such measures are criticized as anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, anti-national, or even anti-democracy depending on the source of money or organization that is being questioned. The power dynamic is such that the Western and European academics have far greater control over the narrative about the rest of the world: Voices from different cultures and places, thus, need to decolonize academia and reclaim their spaces and stories by identifying and addressing orientalism and ethnocentrism. However, in doing so, many fear being labeled and bullied, especially due to the herd mentality most prominently manifested across social media, and some sections of academia. It is also a concern if academics misrepresent facts and then repeat their work, as proof of their argument, and thus committing tautological errors.

While explaining terrorism in India, Martin (2015) notes that “Nationalists declared independence of Khalistan in 1987, but 500,000 Indian troops violently occupied Punjab, causing an estimated 250,000 Sikh deaths between 1984 and 1992” (p. 146). Martin does not cite any source for this information. In their work, Singh and Kim (2018) note that the official number of deaths during the insurgency was 30,000. Martin’s numbers are closest to the estimates given by the Council of Khalistan (Kumar, 2008), an anti-India organization (Purewal, 2011) that supported the militancy that resulted in extensive violence and killings of civilians, public officials, and police and army personnel. It does not imply that Martin cannot use these numbers, but that as an academic, he should cite the source and perhaps even acknowledge the different estimates, and a lack of corroboration. Additionally, the victims included Sikhs, Hindus, civilians, army, and police personnel. The textbook where Martin writes this has already had at least five editions. It is not difficult to imagine that the same numbers could have been repeated in journals, newspapers, conferences, and other forums. Both misinformation and skewed information are problematic in trying to assess the extent of any problem. As criminologists conduct research in cross-cultural settings or conduct historical analysis about topics on which they do not have first-hand information, it is all the more important to recognize limitations of access to information, language barriers, intent and ideological blocs and compulsions of the gatekeepers providing that information, and the resultant gaps.

In the age of global communication, journalists often serve as gatekeepers or first responders in providing an account of crime and victimization in various parts of the world. This is not a new development, but the speed of information and the need to give the “breaking news” puts hurdles in checking the veracity of the information or getting complete information before it has traveled half the world away; misinformation cuts across the ideological divide (“When in 2012,” 2019; Fox, 2018; Gray, 2017). The stereotypes about India are not limited only to caste and religion, but also sex crimes and the news about rape is often presented as an Indian male mentality. It got accentuated after the horrific Nirbhaya gangrape where a young wom...