Culture and Research

Be inclusive, aware and culturally competent

The Methodspace focus for September 2022 is on culture and research. We will explore issues researchers face when conducting inquiries within their own cultures, or in different cultures. We’ll hear about the experiences of cross-cultural research collaboration, hearing the real stories, so we can learn the strategies they use to overcome obstacles.

We will share resources that help researchers:

• Locate, read, cite literature from globally-diverse sources and include theories from different cultural perspectives,

• Find ways to develop cultural, racial awareness in a research context, and

• Understand ways to design, conduct, write about cross-cultural or multicultural research.

What is culture? Culture is difficult to define. Here are a few ways that researchers and theorists have described culture:

“Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values.”
— Kluckhohn (1951)

“Culture is shared mental software, the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.” — Hofstede (2001)

“Culture acts as a pattern in the way people perceive, relate to, and interpret information signals that influence both individual as well as group behavior.”— Goodenough (1994)

Entire fields of study are dedicated to explanations of culture, but even at a cursory level we can see that culture involves shared ways of thinking, perceiving, and understanding. Whether the context is a community, organization, or online discussion group, there are insiders who share those ways and outsiders who do not. Where do researchers fit… and how can they conduct research if they do not? We will explore these questions from a variety of perspectives.

Introducing September’s Mentors in Residence

Two experienced researchers will help us think about cultural issues in research. Safary Wa-Mbaleka and Arceli Rosario are co-founders of the Asian Qualitative Research Association and co-editors of The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in the Asian Context. It is the first book to focus specifically on qualitative research in the Asian context and includes diverse contributors from Asia such as the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, India, Oman, China, South Korea, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Hong Kong, and from other continents such as North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. If you have the SAGE Knowledge in your library’s database, you can access handbook chapters online.

You will find a video interview with the editors, and some Handbook contributors will offer guest posts this month on Methodspace. Additionally, wewill feature guest posts from around the world and open-access resources.

---

Methodspace posts about cultural issues in research