Complexities of Analysis in Cross-Cultural Research

Abstract

Postmodern researchers have long recognized that knowledge, the analyses that led to it, and, hence, the actions that come from it are filtered through the researcher’s way of viewing the world. What humans see and hear and feel and even sense is affected by present circumstances and past experience. If we come in from outside on a cold day, the inside can feel very warm until we sit still long enough to realize that it isn’t quite warm enough. Our experience of reality is situated in place, in culture, in gender, in time. Truth is seen through our complicated bundle of identities and resultant standpoints. I used to wear a light sweater as a grown woman on a cool day and still bundle my infant granddaughter, whose circulation was no doubt better than mine, in a number of blankets, until some knowledge about circulatory systems and logic intervened. My initial grandmotherly lens on an infant’s need for wrappings might have been absorbed from my mother and her grandmother, until logic and the viewing of lightly wrapped children in other cultures intervened. And with, for instance, a poem, an important part of what meaning it initially makes for us has to do with its consonance or dissonance with our own experience, experience that reflects, infects, and affects our sense of its meaning. It is often when others with different experience weigh in on the same poem that our perspectives can grow and readjust. Thus it can be with data analysis. Stuck in our own standpoint/perspective, our ability to analyze can be limited.

You can find multiple ways of being clever when you collect data and sensitive and ethical, but what you do with that data is another layer of ethical responsibility.

(Martin Nakata, Torres Strait Islander, University of South Australia)