The Value of Keeping an Open Eye for Methodological Issues in Research on Resilience and Culture

Abstract

While research on resilience and culture has been diverse and fruitful, it can be further enhanced by rigorous research design, implementation, and analysis. Notably, research would gain from further integration of qualitative and quantitative methods. Drawing on frameworks from quantitative cross-cultural methods, we first review construct, method, and item bias arising in resilience research involving multiple cultures, and the corresponding levels of equivalence in cross-cultural comparisons. Specifically, studies on resilience measures, validation and comparison of resilience across cultures, and large-scale resilience projects are examined. We then extend the discussion to qualitative (and mixed) methods. We argue that most methods for dealing with bias in quantitative research also apply to comparative qualitative research. We propose strategies including choice of data collection methods aimed at enhancing the design of the study; we also discuss procedures that affect the quality of quantitative and qualitative data analysis. It should be noted that qualitative procedures for comparative analyses are not well developed and that procedures for validating cross-cultural differences are largely absent in qualitative methods. As a consequence, much of our discussion focuses on how to examine comparability of cross-cultural data and examples of studies in which these procedures have been used. We integrate the use of mixed methods, as the conversion of qualitative to quantitative data opens a wide array of validation procedures.