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Cross-Cultural Variation

From the perspecv1narrow-street-havana-cuba-jpg-rend-tccom-1280-96008_3col_african-markettives of both popular discourse and academic social science, cross-cultural comparisons are usually construed as a “between-groups” exercise, and this is of course entirely valid.  However, I suggest that a more nuanced approach is to reframe the issue as cultural variation both within- and across groups.  Mixed methods capture cultural variation at two levels: at micro-levels of interactional social life via qualitative interviews and participant observation, and at meso- and macro-levels of sociocultural discourse via surveys and other instruments.  The recent development of the joint display in mixed methods research offers a particularly promising methodological tool for tracing and framing specific cultural variations across data sets. This exercise encourages the researcher to distinguish what is temporary and situational versus psychological and individual versus social and regional versus cultural and historical, and critically to look for –emic and –etic rationales, both those of the participants and those of the social scientist.

In Mixed Methods: Interviews, Surveys, and Cross-Cultural Comparisons, I provide a template for joint display table for making comparisons (p. 226) and a worked example using data from a study of ethnic beliefs about Alzheimer’s disease (p. 228).

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