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Youth Resilience and Culture pp 189–201Cite as

The Value of Keeping an Open Eye for Methodological Issues in Research on Resilience and Culture

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Part of the book series: Cross-Cultural Advancements in Positive Psychology ((CAPP,volume 11))

Abstract

While research on resilience and culture has been diverse and fruitful, it can be further enhanced by rigorous research design, implementation, and analysis. Notably, research would gain from further integration of qualitative and quantitative methods. Drawing on frameworks from quantitative cross-cultural methods, we first review construct, method, and item bias arising in resilience research involving multiple cultures, and the corresponding levels of equivalence in cross-cultural comparisons. Specifically, studies on resilience measures, validation and comparison of resilience across cultures, and large-scale resilience projects are examined. We then extend the discussion to qualitative (and mixed) methods. We argue that most methods for dealing with bias in quantitative research also apply to comparative qualitative research. We propose strategies including choice of data collection methods aimed at enhancing the design of the study; we also discuss procedures that affect the quality of quantitative and qualitative data analysis. It should be noted that qualitative procedures for comparative analyses are not well developed and that procedures for validating cross-cultural differences are largely absent in qualitative methods. As a consequence, much of our discussion focuses on how to examine comparability of cross-cultural data and examples of studies in which these procedures have been used. We integrate the use of mixed methods, as the conversion of qualitative to quantitative data opens a wide array of validation procedures.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Jia He & Fons J. R. Van de Vijver

  2. Department of Psychology, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

    Fons J. R. Van de Vijver

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Fons J. R. Van de Vijver

Authors
  1. Jia He
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  2. Fons J. R. Van de Vijver
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Correspondence to Fons J. R. Van de Vijver .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Optentia Research Focus Area, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa

    Linda C. Theron

  2. Resilience Research Centre, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Linda Liebenberg

  3. Resilience Research Centre, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Michael Ungar

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He, J., Van de Vijver, F.J.R. (2015). The Value of Keeping an Open Eye for Methodological Issues in Research on Resilience and Culture. In: Theron, L., Liebenberg, L., Ungar, M. (eds) Youth Resilience and Culture. Cross-Cultural Advancements in Positive Psychology, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9415-2_14

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