Cross-Cultural Research

Cross-Cultural Research

Cross-cultural researchers examine differences and similarities between different groups in society. A concern with culture and cross-cultural research permeates a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and social work.

Part of the difficulty in defining and separating cultures is that what they consist of can be based on a variety of characteristics, including race, gender, and age. There has been interesting research, for example, on youth culture, lesbian culture, and drug and gang culture. Cross-cultural research in these examples would refer to behavior and beliefs characterized by age, sexuality, and lifestyle. However, cross-cultural research is often seen as being about race, ethnicity, and (more recently) religious differences.

Researchers have studied cultures using a variety of methods, including interviews and ethnographies. Interviews are usually loosely structured to allow participants to put forward their concerns and perspectives. Interviewers can use a variety of theoretical approaches to inform their interviewing, including the increasing use of biographical narrative theories to situate lives within the context of the culture they are examining.

Some of the issues addressed by cross-cultural interviewers are also of concern to ethnographers, and ethnographers may use interviews to collect some of their data.

There are differing views about the period of time needed to study a culture in this way as well as the status of the findings. Some researchers believe that it is a way of finding “the truth” about a culture, whereas others suggest that it provides valuable data but is still dependent on the perspectives of those involved.

Cross-Cultural Research

Cross-cultural researchers examine differences and similarities between different groups in society. A concern with culture and cross-cultural research permeates a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and social work.

Part of the difficulty in defining and separating cultures is that what they consist of can be based on a variety of characteristics, including race, gender, and age. There has been interesting research, for example, on youth culture, lesbian culture, and drug and gang culture. Cross-cultural research in these examples would refer to behavior and beliefs characterized by age, sexuality, and lifestyle. However, cross-cultural research is often seen as being about race, ethnicity, and (more recently) religious differences.

Researchers have studied cultures using a variety of methods, including interviews and ethnographies. Interviews are usually loosely structured to allow participants to put forward their concerns and perspectives. Interviewers can use a variety of theoretical approaches to inform their interviewing, including the increasing use of biographical narrative theories to situate lives within the context of the culture they are examining.

Some of the issues addressed by cross-cultural interviewers are also of concern to ethnographers, and ethnographers may use interviews to collect some of their data.

There are differing views about the period of time needed to study a culture in this way as well as the status of the findings. Some researchers believe that it is a way of finding “the truth” about a culture, whereas others suggest that it provides valuable data but is still dependent on the perspectives of those involved.

Critical Theory

Critical Theory

Critical theory is a foundational perspective from which analysis of social action, politics, science, and other human endeavors can proceed. Research drawing from critical theory has critique (assessment of the current state and the requirements to reach a desired state) at its center.

Critique entails examination of both action and motivation; that is, it includes both what is done and why it is done. In application, it is the use of dialectic, reason, and ethics as means to study the conditions under which people live. This entry describes the development of critical theory and its applications to a variety of research questions.

Although there are three identified stages of critical theory, all three conceptions have methodological value. There are some conceptual and foundational differences among the three stages, but there are questions as to which methodological specifics of each stage can be applied. The realm of social theory generally is extremely broad; any historical, political, economic, and technological elements can be studied in depth. Furthermore, conceptions of ideology can be applied to analysis in numerous ways. Therefore, the changes to critical theory do not represent suppressive variables. Because of the breadth of critical theory’s brush, many kinds of questions may be amenable to its application.

The observation consists of the living conditions of individuals, the kinds of work being done and the places where the work is done and spatial limitations that effectively limit movement, living space, and other kinds of existence. The observation is informed (shaped) by critical theory.

Opportunities for observation in the critical theoretic framework exist in the normal course of events. For example, a city may plan to rejuvenate a downtown area that has fallen into a state of deterioration. The plan could involve housing, retail business, office space, and other elements. Initially, the plan will likely be subject to review at several levels, including community response.

Individuals, who are other selves, apprehend their lived lives in some particular ways. For instance, spatial limitations might be perceived not merely as geographic boundaries but also as social and cultural boundaries. The meaning of perceptions can be comprehended by researchers only by inquiring of the individuals. Asking people what they believe is open to them and what is closed is the practical application of reason by the researcher. The interviewing process also opens the potential practice of reason on the part of the interviewees.

The second and third stages of critical theory, in particular, pay attention to people lived lives. The second stage is especially influenced by Habermas’s work in communicative action and discourse ethics. During this stage, a more pragmatic focus to inquiry is evident.

One factor that pervades all three stages of critical theory is the recognition that reason is possible and necessary for human action. The practice of critique depends both on reasons as a tool for the practice and on observation of practical reason. Reason as applied by the researcher entails the avoidance of engaging in human behavior and action as instrumentalities.

Analysis grounded in critical theory includes examination of ideological forces and statements that influence human action. Once again, this aspect of critical theory signals its Marxian basis; capitalism is a major ideology that has been, and continues to be, the focus of much attention. During the first stage, capitalism was the dominant perceived ideology. During the latter two stages, the study of ideology was broadened to include many aspects of race, gender, class, and other things.

The warnings that customarily apply to observational study, interviewing, and phenomenological research in general also apply with regard to critical theory. Errors or insufficiencies in those areas could have deleterious effects on the process and product of critique. Because critique is the intended outcome of investigation, it is essential that the researcher apply the theory with care and vigilance.

Critical Research

Critical Research

Critical research is a loosely defined genre of social inquiry whose central theme involves the problematization of knowledge. Knowledge is not simply a matter of representing and explaining reality but rather a social phenomenon itself, having substantive– constitutive relations to personal identities, social practices, institutions, and power structures. This includes knowledge produced by social researchers; therefore, critical research must profoundly include a self-reflexive or reflective component.

Most critical research practiced at this time draws from both critical theory and poststructuralism/postmodernism despite the differences between them. This is possible because there are intersections between critical theory and poststructuralism/ postmodernism at the level of methodology and at many levels of sociocultural criticism.

Foucault’s research methods are called archaeology and genealogy. Both are ways to study knowledge in the human sciences as discourse practices that construct specific forms of the human subject   internally (e.g., “the insane,” “the criminal,” “the sexual deviant”), mask the arbitrary form of these constructions, and then subjugate the constructed subjects to punishment, discipline, examination, and surveillance.

Contradictions in the notion of the human subject as it emerged at the end of the 18th century are regarded as insightful—not condemning—by critical theory. Philosophies based on dialectical reason modified Kantian insights to argue that existence itself is contradictory.

Freedom is a state of knowing one’s self to not be anything objective, but self-knowledge requires objectivations from which to reflect. Hence, in different ways, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx developed theories in which the epistemic subject–object relation has an ontological status; knowledge is part of an existential spiral in which subjectivity acts to objectivate (“posit”) itself and then reflects from the objectivations to know itself and know itself as free.

In Hegel and Marx, the subject is transindividual—a cosmic subject for Hegel and a species subject for Marx—and develops itself through history with the staged overcoming of alienated forms of self-understanding.

Critical theory has had a first generation, which emphasized dialectical reason but sought to combine it with Weberian social theory and the psychoanalytic tradition, and a second generation, which shifted from dialectics to intersubjectivity. The theory of communicative action developed by Jürgen Habermas has been most influential for contemporary forms of research informed by critical theory. Such research makes use of virtually all research methods available to the social sciences at this time, including empiricist methods, interpretive hermeneutic methods, critical hermeneutics, and systems theory. What makes research critical are not the methods employed but rather the theory of knowledge and society used in designing a study and interpreting results. A typical critical research project will artfully combine several methods.

Critical Ethnography

 

Critical Ethnography

Critical ethnography is a relatively new mode of qualitative investigation and one in need of further elaboration, discussion, and debate. Critical ethnography shares the methods of traditional ethnography, such as by seeking the emic perspective gained through intense fieldwork, but it adds an explicit political focus.

Critical ethnography has its roots in the well-established tradition of anthropological ethnography. Critical ethnography grew out of dissatisfaction with both the a theoretical stance of traditional ethnography, which ignored social structures such as class, patriarchy, and racism, and what some regarded as the overly deterministic and theoretical approaches of critical theory, which ignored the lived experience and agency of human actors.

The most notable publications influencing the uptake and development of critical ethnography have been Jim Thomas’s Doing Critical Ethnography, which outlined the theoretical underpinnings of critical ethnography, and Phil Carspecken’s Critical Ethnography in Educational Research, which provided a methodological theory of critical ethnography accompanied by empirical techniques, data, and findings.

Carspecken pointed to what he referred to as a social ontology tied tightly to critical epistemology. He described the social site of research as composed of social interactions between actors and the social practices that reproduce systemic relationships.

These interactions and relations occur within the context of economic, political, and cultural structures that integrate the particular social site, and the actors within it, within a society. These interactions, Carspecken noted, can be evidenced through objective, subjective, and normative truth claims inherent in all human interaction.

Critical ethnographic approaches necessarily rely on reflexivity of method and, as such, must recognize the interplay between the researcher and the participant, between data and theory, and between research and action. Critical ethnographic projects need to move beyond the interview-only study not only to engage participants in naturalistic dialogue but also to involve them as co-researchers with a stake in interpreting results and suggesting avenues for action.

The methodology of critical ethnography has emerged as a useful approach to explore many of the issues confronting contemporary society. Although there are a range of possibilities in terms of method, these need to be located within a robust ontology and epistemology to counter challenges posed by critics of openly ideological research. Although a single study might not achieve the structural change desired by either researchers or participants, adhering to the principles of critical research methodologies will enable both parties to identify and explore oppression and inequality and to move closer to emancipatory action.

Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a theoretical approach to studying the role of language in society that originated within linguistics but has found widespread application across the social sciences.

M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, which provides an important foundation for current CDA theory and methodology as well. Although the specific research areas and methods of analysis within CDA are by no means homogeneous, what unites all scholars engaged in CDA is a critical perspective that is geared toward examining the subtle ways in which unequal power relations are maintained and reproduced through language use.

The term discourse is generally understood to refer to any instance of signification, or meaning-making, whether through oral or written language or nonverbal means. In this sense, a dinner table conversation and a newspaper article on globalization are instances of discourse, and so is an advertisement in a fishing magazine, although most CDA analyses rely on written texts or transcripts of oral interactions as data.

Much of the early work within CDA targeted the political domain. This remains a very active line of research to date, and studies typically scrutinize speeches by key politicians or critique documents published by government agencies, institutions, or international organizations. Many scholars have engaged in researching and critiquing media texts from a CDA perspective, pointing to systematic biases and discriminatory tendencies in news reporting.

In addition to methodological and conceptual diversity, CDA as a mode of investigation lacks a unitary theoretical framework, although it is by no means a theoretical.

Norman Fairclough was one of the leading developers of CDA’s theoretical grounding, and his writings have become standard reference points for many who pursue critical textual analysis. One of the theoretical challenges for CDA as a socially and politically sensitive model of language use has been to explicate the relationship between discourse and social formations while attending to the layered nature of social existence.

A second theoretical strand within CDA concerns itself with the role of cognition in maintaining oppressive social practices and reproducing ideologies, and the works of Teun van Dijk and Paul Chilton are relevant in this regard. Cognition within CDA is always socially rooted and encompasses shared group norms, beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies. Researchers studying social cognition emphasize that individual or group discriminatory practices, such as acts of race related violence or anti-immigrant legislation, need to be studied in conjunction with the social cognitions (attitudes and ideologies) that are necessary to produce and maintain them.

title

 

Use of sanction in U.S foreign policy: The case of UN resolution 2231 on Iran

 

1)      Economic sanctions reconsidered; History and current policy

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=etyVmnPOrG8C&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=sanction+on+U.S+foreign+policy&ots=Te9ClmSb0L&sig=JWRUp3DgkPfGIGtwufomhWrFEBw#v=onepage&q=sanction%20on%20U.S%20foreign%20policy&f=false

 

2)       Designing foreign policy: Voters, special interest groups, and economic sanctions

3)      Economic sanctions and the U.S foreign policy

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8772878&fileId=S1049096500022654

 

4)      Trade Sanctions As Policy Instruments: A Re-Examination

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2600674?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

 

5)      Sanctions as a Foreign Policy Tool: Weighing Humanitarian Impulses

http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/36/5/499.short

 

6) The Iranian quagmire: How to move forward

7)Trade sanctions in international environmental policy: Deterring or encouraging free riding?

 

8)      Economic sanctions as a instrument in The U.S foreign policy

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=mn7Wxx1SigcC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=sanction+on+U.S+foreign+policy&ots=o3Quf28lN0&sig=tP5pP-MxhJDMku9duf_-KlS3O18#v=onepage&q=sanction%20on%20U.S%20foreign%20policy&f=false

 

 

9) The effect of foreign direct investment on the use and success of US sanctions 

10)Why sanctions against Iran are counterproductive: Conflict resolution and state–society relations

Critical Action Research

Critical Action Research

The critical action research process turns the traditional power hierarchy between “professional” researchers and research “subjects” upside down and invokes a commitment to break down the dominance and privilege of researchers to produce relevant research that is able to be sensitive to the complexities of contextual and relational reality.

In this type of research, the stakeholders of the research work with the researchers to define the problem and set the research agenda, find new ways of seeing the situation, and work toward solutions. The process empowers both the researchers and the research participants because the research effort allows discovery and exploration of power differentials in the research relationship as well as in the community under study.

This entry describes action research, critical theory, and their integration to form critical action research. It then presents a number of examples of such research and reviews some of the challenges in using this approach.

 

Critical Theory

Critical theory looks at, exposes, and questions hegemony— traditional power assumptions held about relationships, groups, communities, societies, and organizations—to promote social change. Combined with action research, critical theory questions the assumed power that researchers typically hold over the people they typically research.

Critical action research takes the concept of knowledge- as-power, and equalizes the generation of, access to, and use of that knowledge. Critical action research is an ethical choice that gives voice to and shares power with, previously marginalized and muted people.

Critical action researchers do this by questioning the social implications and moral issues of action and by seeking shared understanding of the social action.

Critical action research seeks to empower people by involving them in the study of the social processes that have constructed their submissive positions in society.

The aim of critical action research is twofold: (1) improved understanding of a social phenomenon and (2) social transformation at a community or organizational level resulting from reflexivity and self-reflection about the hegemony in the research relationship and in the community or organization.

Critical action research follows a collaborative cycle between participants and researchers of reflecting, planning, acting, observing, reflecting, replanning, and so on. Elizabeth DePoy and colleagues in 1999 suggested a model of critical action research that includes the following:

1. Recognizing and articulating a social problem

2. Convening a steering committee from among all stakeholder groups

3. Identifying the scope of the research and the type of social change desired

4. Selecting a collaborative research team

5. Training laid researchers on the research team in research methods

6. Designing the study, including research questions and methods

7. Conducting the study and analysis

8. Reporting the findings in accessible formats to all stakeholder groups

9. Acting on the findings by planning and following through with social change

10. Identifying a steering committee for follow-up inquiry

 

Critical action research is an ethical choice that exposes and seeks to change existing power structures and inequalities within the community under study. It does so within a framework of smoothing out inequalities within the research structure. Both of these processes, at the research level and at the community level, are fraught with the challenges expected when rebelling against the status quo. This research-asactivism process leads to social change, but it is neither smooth nor easy. It is, however, worthwhile.

Content Analysis

Content Analysis

Content analysis is the intellectual process of categorizing qualitative textual data into clusters of similar entities, or conceptual categories, to identify consistent patterns and relationships between variables or themes. Qualitative content analysis is sometimes referred to as latent content analysis.

Content analysis is a method that is independent of theoretical perspective or framework (e.g., grounded theory, phenomenology) but has its beginnings as a quantitative method.

Where quantitative content analysis is helpful in answering “what” questions, qualitative content analysis can be helpful in answering “why” questions and analyzing perceptions.

In qualitative research, content analysis is interpretive, involving close reading of text. Qualitative researchers using a content analytic approach recognize that text is open to subjective interpretation, reflects multiple meanings, and is context dependent (e.g., part of a larger discourse).

When analyzing qualitative data such as interview transcripts, analyses across the whole set of data typically produce clusters or codes that translate into “themes.” For example, an interview study that explores the experience of new parenthood may produce interview transcripts that are analyzed for content related to themes ranging from stress to social isolation to joy.

Textual data include non-written text, such as photographic data, equally open to content analysis. In this case, the researcher may identify content as straightforwardly as identifying objects evident in photographs or may conduct more subtle analyses of symbolic communications that can be unconsciously discerned from a physical space.

Content analysis could be applied to the official reports and policies of an organization; such an analysis may identify the stated priorities of that organization as well as reveal implicit political perspectives.

The results of a content analysis may reveal recurrent instances of “items” or themes, or they may reveal broader discourses. The “categories” or clusters of data identified may represent discrete instances (i.e., something is apparent or not), or they may be represented as degrees of attributes, such as direction and intensity, or qualities (i.e., a quality such as joy is evident to some degree rather than simply present or absent).

In quantitative work, content analysis is applied in a deductive manner, producing frequencies of preselected categories or values associated with particular variables. A qualitative approach to content analysis, however, is typically inductive, beginning with deep close reading of text and attempting to uncover the less obvious contextual or latent content therein.

Validity and reliability are key to robust content analysis. In qualitative terms, the researcher doing a qualitative content analysis seeks trustworthiness and credibility by conducting iterative analyses, seeking negative or contradictory examples, seeking confirmatory data through methodological triangulation, and providing supporting examples for conclusions drawn.

Comparative Research

Comparative Research

Comparative research is a broad term that refers to the evaluation of the similarities, differences, and associations between entities. Entities may be based on many lines such as statements from an interview or individual, symbols, case studies, social groups, geographical or political configurations, and cross-national comparisons.

Comparative research is used within most qualitative approaches, such as comparisons by core emic categories in ethnographic studies, within-case comparisons in phenomenology, case study   comparisons, comparative politics, and examination of contrasts in narrative and discourse analysis.

 

The Goal of Comparative Research

The underlying goal of comparative research is to search for similarity and variation between the entities that are the object of comparison.

The ontology of patterns or categories is assumed to be universal and independent of time and space. In other words, the comparison should be broad enough to allow researchers to compare at a “higher level” of abstraction.

Following Max Weber’s comparative sociology, for example, the search for variance places more emphasis on context and difference so as to understand specificities. Comparisons not only uncover differences between social entities but also reveal unique aspects of a particular entity that would be virtually impossible to detect otherwise.

A well-known type of comparative analysis used in qualitative research is Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss’s technique of “constant comparative analysis” derived from the sociological theory of symbolic interactionism.

The central task is to compare one piece of data with all others to compare similarities and differences. Data may be in the form of an interview, a statement, a theme, or another specified unit.

Another common comparative application within qualitative research is that of cross-national comparisons. A long-standing practice in ethnography is the use of “controlled comparison” of different societies stemming from the work of Frederick Eggan during the early 1950s.

Comparative research poses several key methodological problems that continue to frustrate, captivate, and stimulate researchers. These are the selection of cases (including the unit, level, and scale of analysis), construct equivalence, case versus characteristic orientation, and the debate regarding causality.

 

Comparative Analysis

Comparative Analysis

Comparison is at the heart of most social sciences research. Comparison can take place between different entities, such as individuals, interviews, statements, settings, themes, groups, and cases, or at different points in time. These entities or time periods are then analyzed to isolate prominent similarities and differences, a process that is described by the term comparative analysis.

It involves taking one entity or piece of data, such as a statement, an interview, or a theme, and comparing it with others to identify similarities or differences.

Comparative analysis is also a primary task within case study research. Case studies are often compiled with the knowledge that comparisons will be made with the description of a particular case. In some instances, researchers will compare a particular case with that of a hypothetical reference group or frame of reference to highlight differences.

This focus on comparison is at odds with the approach of “thick description” by Clifford Geertz, where the detailed description of the case itself, as opposed to the comparison, is the focus of the study. A comparative qualitative approach to the examination of cases is often via the examination of a few cases in a very intensive manner.