The Experience of Family in Japan and the United States: Working with the Constraints Inherent in Cross-Cultural Research

Abstract

Social scientists involved on cross-cultural research face a variety of challenges. This issue is discussed in the context of emic and etic approaches to research. A project illustrating some of these challenges is presented. A projective measure completed by each family as a group was used to capture the experience of family in Japanese and American families. Some culturebased hypotheses were confirmed, and an interesting serendipitous finding was explored in depth by a cross-cultural team. The unexpected finding was that pictures made by Japanese families, compared to those made by American families, were more likely to contain multiple images of the family. Further evaluation showed that the Japanese multiple images were most likely to reflect a textured, non-unitary experience, depicting a variety of contexts. The paper concludes by providing suggestions for enhancing the quality of cross-cultural research.