Cross-Cultural Research with Integrity

Collected Wisdom from Researchers in Social Settings

Kenneth A. Loparo, Linda Miller Cleary

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349442638, 9781137263599
• eBook ISBN: 9781137263605
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on the experience and insights of 70 researchers across 7 countries and from a diverse range of cultures, regions and disciplines, this book explores the issues and ethics involved in cross-cultural research and how such research can be done with integrity.

1

Nothing Stands Still

To cross-cultural borders in research is a slippery and complicated endeavor, and good intentions, though essential, are not enough to help researchers make those crossings with respect for those they research and with their own integrity intact. With diversity now a world-wide reality, cross-cultural research has become an endeavor for most of those who research in social settings. Though cross-cultural research has different meanings in different disciplines, it is hoped that this book will benefit any researcher who crosses into another culture to pose questions, formulate hypotheses, accrue new knowledge, or, even better, collaborate with those of a different culture to solve problems.

An increase in the multicultural nature of our regional research populations, due to regional and global mobility and migration patterns, has been further increased by newer notions of culture. Though research used to focus on the cultural difference of race and ethnicity, researchers now see the need to reach beyond those borders that implied travel to different neighborhoods or distant spaces. Now we rarely engage in research that doesn’t include participants from different ethnicities, nationalities, sexual orientations, races, religions, social classes, political affiliations, occupations, and/or language groups, all groups with different ways of being. These factors affect research and call for sensitivities that were not deemed as important in previous decades.

In the past, many researchers came to their inquiries bound by their own cultural perspective and intent on their own goals and conclusions. Researchers now investigate and question the primacy of their own realities and have come to value different world views. Furthermore, within the last half-century, ethical concerns have taken on serious consideration in research, and researchers are finding ways to collaborate with communities that have been, with good reason, resistant to research that has been harmful in the past. Thinking through cross-cultural research methodology is necessary to heal wounds and to meet local as well as knowledge-based needs.

Certainly, globalization allows us to learn from other cultures and from other researchers, shifting us away from being a solitary researcher to undertaking team endeavors with “an emphasis on transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and multi-perspective approaches . . . which cross discipline boundaries as well as state and national divides” (Grbich, 2004, pp. 51–52). Traveling, physically or metaphorically, from one culture to another allows us richer perspectives, from richer understandings of different social settings to richer ways of viewing reality. And there is an impetus in the very world problems that face us. As Leung and Van de Vijver (2006, p. 443) note, “Challenges of humankind such as global warming, terrorism, and arms control require the cooperation of many nations.” We must understand other perspectives if we are to transact the social change needed to address these problems, and the issues of human suffering and human rights.

The reality of globalization continues to challenge local cultures and their needs. Business and media conglomerates, most often driven by profit, will continue to capitalize on those who have less power in the world instead of learning from local insights and meeting local needs. Walter Ong (1999, as cited in Ladson-Billings and Donnor, 2008, pp. 74–75) “warns of the growing threat of global capital that destabilizes notions of cultural unity and/or allegiance. Instead, the overwhelming power of multinational corporations creates economic cleavage that force people, regardless of their racial, cultural, and ethnic locations, to chase jobs and compete against each other to subsist.” Cross-cultural research collaborations can seek to disrupt those competitions and elucidate the “tension between democratic and market values” that disadvantages certain cultural populations (Giroux and Giroux, 2008, p. 181).

This book looks at issues in cross-cultural research, from initiation of research to its dissemination, by tapping the insights of interviewed researchers who were both troubled and pleased, many simultaneously, with their cross-cultural efforts. Some 70 researchers (from four continents, from seven different nations, from different cultures within those nations, and from different academic disciplines) each draw from their geopolitical and cultural contexts and give earnest insights from their cross-cultural research experiences. Those interviewed were themselves varied: some well known in their fields, others working hard at research but who haven’t yet made it to the top of the academic ladder; those sitting well on top of their privilege to those fighting on the margins for privilege well deserved. Herein lies a cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-national intersection of thought. Interviewed researchers offer their experience, stories, insights, and analyses, but the book also integrates their experience with thought from seminal works on cross-cultural research and with critiques on methodological issues from authors who draw from (and even critique) postcolonial, post-structural, and postmodern ideologies.

Researchers work off one another to create progress in cross-cultural research. Indeed, readers of this book must be active in considering, rejecting, or accepting the proffered advice in relation to their own research agendas. Multiple researchers, multiple stories, and multiple interpretations reach out across the pages to the curious readers as they consider their own research. Many of the interviews for this book morphed into recorded dialogic conversations between the interviewee and me as interviewer, creating, as Grbich (2004, p. 84) describes, “a link between the therapeutic and scholarly aspects of research.” As researchers we evolve. Through this gathering of researchers’ stories, reflexivity (the researcher’s self-examinations of interpretive positions), and resultant insights, we help each other evolve. Nevertheless, perhaps we are arrogant if we think that any absolute truths can outlast a conversation or the reading of a book.

As researcher and author, I take agency in the construction of this text, positioning myself in relation to the topic as the book progresses, allowing my lived cross-cultural experiences to be a part of the whole. The impetus for this book was not dispassionate; it originated in my research association with Julian Cho, the Humanities Department Chair at Toledo Community College. On my first trip to southern Belize in 1996 to study Indigenous literacy, I hiked into a Maya community inland from Punta Gorda. There I witnessed the results of the advent of electricity in the village, which had occurred just days before: one electric pole wired to a thatched community gathering place, a television, and 15 or so Maya children mesmerized by US television. The following day, in an interview with Cho, I described what I had seen and asked him about the possible loss of culture in his Maya village. His response was: “Nothing stands still.” We talked about the complexities of surface vs. deep culture, about the tenacity of deep culture, about the place of literacy and schooling in a changing world, about the losses and gains of modernization, and about issues of poverty and power, and gender and culture in Belize schooling. “Nothing stands still” has become a mantra that he has contributed to this book.

I dedicate this book to Julian Cho. Normally a dedication comes before a book begins, but in this case Cho is a part of my research narrative in multiple chapters. Though my formal research about cross-cultural research wasn’t to begin until after his death, his phrase “Nothing stands still” has come back to me again and again, sometimes from the mouths of those whom I interviewed, sometimes in what I have read, but often as if the late Cho’s contribution was being whispered across the years.

I started with research questions, but they have not stood still and so are hardly worth mentioning. I started with what I thought were some truths, but they quickly dissolved as I collected wisdom from those who had done similar research. Every time I think I have a hold on something absolute to say, it refuses to stay reliably in place. The researchers interviewed for this book rarely touted simple guidelines for a researcher to follow and often raised as many questions as answers. In many cases they posed the very questions that they wished they had asked themselves before entering their own research endeavors. So this will not be a book of absolutes about cross-cultural research, but I feel sure that those who read it, with their own research agendas and minds in tow, will do better research. This is the book that I wish I had had before I began my cross-cultural endeavors.

A not-so-definite definition of culture and identity

In trying to define what cross-cultural research is, I open myself and my readers to an inclusive notion. What Cho had realized wouldn’t stand still, Bhabha (1994, p. 5) deemed as the “shifting nature of culture” and, hence, the shifting nature of cultural borders. For instance, Larry Knopp, Director of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma and geographer, perceived his crossing of cultural borders to be multilayered. He describes his research as looking at “issues of gender and sexuality, and urban change and verbiage, and cultural politics.” In his research he asks the question: “How are gay politics done in a cultural context like Britain, versus the United States, versus Australia, with their different traditions of property ownership or land tenure, like freehold versus leasehold, and the position of these various places in a global and regional economy?” As Knopp and many others point out, cultural borders are layered, complicated, and elusive constructs.

One would think that one region, coastal Maine in the USA, for instance, might evidence some consistency in culture, but Julie Canniff, teacher educator and researcher at the University of Southern Maine, described the complexity she found in studying “concepts of success” there:

In the six years I spent working with teachers and students on the remote Maine islands, I was fascinated with cultural points of view as those from island cultures talked often about how difficult it was for their kids to go to the mainland school. In ways, the culture of poverty was more salient than ethnic culture, but then again you had Native American, French Canadian, and Catholic populations and all their different concepts of success through many generations. I suppose the notion of “culture” to a Maine islander is simply “the way we do things out here.”

I asked Ian Anderson, Director for the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health at the University of Melbourne, what advice he gave to graduate students in considering research that crossed cultural borders. He replied:

Don’t look for the border; it may well be seamless. People who are looking for the border trip over things. Be really aware that you carry a whole set of stereotypes that you will unlearn through time. You may think you are on one side of the border when you aren’t. You may think that you are talking about the same thing, but people have profoundly different experiences even if they are using a common language.

The term cultural “border,” then, is a geographic metaphor. Cultures are rarely totally isolated from one another. Since time immemorial, they have intruded on other cultures, and groups have been pushed out of what was even formally another group’s space (Safran, 1991; Alexander, 2008). In colonization, more powerful groups, often acting beyond their need to survive, have traveled to exert their forceful presence on other cultures around the world, to intrude purposively, with cultural domination, power, privilege, and material gain as motives. Slavery, for instance, was known in almost every ancient civilization and still exists today (Harris, 1999). Hence, oppression has forced most subjugated people to adjust their ways of being by integrating themselves into the intruding culture’s dominant constructs in order to survive and maintain some of their own cultural dignity, or by adapting to the oppressive constructs in order to survive. The Indigenous or other marginalized groups within dominant society often find ways of resisting. bell hooks (1989) noted that “Oppressed people resist by identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, telling their story”(p. 43). hooks (1989, p. 67) quotes Paolo Freire (2005, p. 67), who makes the distinction between integration and adaptation:

Integration with one’s context, as distinguished from adaptation, is a distinctly human activity. Integration results from the capacity to adapt oneself to reality plus the critical capacity to make choices and transform that reality . . . The integrated person is person as Subject. In contrast, the adaptive person is person as object, adaptation representing at most a weak form of self-defense. If man is incapable of changing reality, he adjusts himself instead. Adaptation is behavior characteristic of the animal sphere; exhibited by man, it is symptomatic of his dehumanization.

It would be nice if the age of colonization were over, but the motives for gain may have just changed from the quest for gold or chalices to their metaphoric equivalents. Furthermore, as to be discussed in Chapter 2, power comes with privilege; one moves around in the world with both conscious and unconscious privilege and its benefits, or, possibly even more conscious, the lack thereof.

As researchers, we must interrogate our own motives and privileged positions in research as we move across seemingly seamless, multilayered, yet existing cultural borders to determine whether they involve a sort of neo-colonialism. And in studying what we deem to be important distinctions between cultures, many complications arise. “Nothing stands still.” For instance, some researchers in this study found their participants had taken on more complicated identities than the researchers had initially considered, due to the absorption that occurs when those of one culture either choose or are forced to disappear into another, abjuring or hiding cultural traces of which they might be proud or ashamed, or sometimes simultaneously proud and ashamed. Boundaries become permeable, further complicating this notion of culture. Rosaldo (1993) says: “In contrast with the classic view, which posits culture as a self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns, culture can arguably be conceived as a more porous array of intersections where distinct processes crisscross from within and beyond its borders” (p. 20). Researchers in this study talk of the intersections of race, ethnicity, nationality, region, religion, class, language, gender, generation, sexual preference, and, hence, political stance. Indeed, some found that being culturally sensitive to ethnicity was actually largely being sensitive to the “intersectionality” of gender, language, identity, and socio-economic issues (Delva et al., 2010). Furthermore, each culture and sub-culture (if indeed that isn’t another culture altogether) has its own views of what is right and what is wrong, which further confound researchers’ endeavors because, as with most deep levels of culture, these differences are not necessarily visible or discernible. And consistent with porosity, people often go back and forth between different cultures, speaking with a multiplicity of voices depending on their needs at the time, especially when they are of mixed heritage/hybridity. Both participants and researchers may be caught between pressures from different cultures, finding it expedient to identify differently for understandable purposes. Neither people nor cultures exist in boxes.

Once, in 1993, just as the ice was going out of the rivers and lakes in northern Maine, I talked with a Passamaquoddy elder and educator. I told him that I was beginning to see just how complex the cultural issues and literacy issues were surrounding the education of native people. He paused and then said to me: “When you start to see things simply, you will come closer to the truth.” Since then, I’ve tried to think more simply about culture. As researchers have found, starting with the simplest theory about social and cultural behavior may prove to be more accurate. Surface markers of culture, such as group membership, dress, language, food, customs, language, and geographic positioning, may be easy to identify; deep culture, such as ways of being, shared ways of viewing the world, shared bases of social action, inherited ideas, beliefs, and knowledge, are less transparent. Thinking more simply about culture has led me to see surface and deep culture as a construct that people have developed to live in the conditions that their worlds present, ways to survive and thrive. And, of course, the conditions of survival and “thrival” change. The language of a culture evolves, both to allow communication between people for survival and to simultaneously shape, or maintain and articulate, experience. Religion develops to explain the mysteries in the seeable and unseeable world. When people from one culture come into contact with those from another, what Cole (1991) calls “inherently sociocultural-contextual-historical boundedness of mental processes” can be hard to figure out (p. 437). But this lack of understanding is dependent on the relative lack of contact between people who have been inculcated into different ways of being and who use different geopolitical knowledge upon which to thrive and survive. Furthermore, different disciplines use different concepts of culture, indeed different researchers within the same discipline, upon which to base their research. For instance, psychologists Matsumoto and Yoo (2006) note that some definitions allow psychologists to better control variables, eliminating noncultural variables.

And, of course, identity and perspective are inextricably related to culture and sometimes seen as derived from ancestors. As Grande (2008, p. 233) says, “And when I say ‘my perspective,’ I mean from a consciousness shaped not only by my own experiences, but also those of my peoples and ancestors.” Yet, identity is also, in part, a willful thing. One takes on cultural values, perspectives, and behaviors and rejects them, in part due to the way one has been enculturated (the way one has taken on culture non-consciously) but also based on decisions about the way one views oneself in relation to surrounding groups. Identity can also be evolved in rebellion. When we become cross-cultural researchers, we confront the importance of understanding ourselves, our cultural roots, how we live those roots or challenge them, where we are going, and what influences us along the way. Notions of culture thus become intermixed with notions of identity. Shirley Brice Heath, linguistic anthropologist at Stanford University, who has looked at language and literacy development across socio-cultures, stated at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference in 2006 that people hold not just one or two identities but are “bundles of identity.” More recently in an interview, Heath referred to “crowded selves” using Shemeem Black’s (2010) term. Bundles of identity play out in the multiple ways one presents oneself, determined by one’s surroundings at any given moment. Indeed, we construct identity as a way to survive or thrive in that moment. I am a bundle of identities, and I may play out a particular construct of my multiple identities, consciously or unconsciously, as I go about my life. These conceptualizations of myself tie into social identities or collective identities as I move into different groups and arenas (Stryker et al., 2006, p. 26). I present the fol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Nothing Stands Still
• 2. Initiating Research: Whose Question? Whose Benefit? Whose Knowledge?
• 3. Getting Started: Questions, Community Agreements, Consent, Institutional Approval, and Funding
• 4. Choosing Methods
• 5. Understanding Identity, Discourse, and Language to Inform Research
• 6. Entering Another Culture
• 7. Gathering Data while Respecting Participants
• 8. Complexities of Analysis in Cross-Cultural Research
• 9. Dissemination: Reciprocity as an Imperative for Action
• 10. The Two-Way Bridge: Doing Cross-Cultural Research with Integrity
• List of Quoted Researchers
• Works Cited
• Index