Cross-national Research Project Research Articles

Facilitating research ethics in qualitative research through doctoral supervision in the context of European Commission funding

The increasing need for innovative research driven by rapid global changes gives doctoral supervisors of early-stage researchers a significant role in facilitating the ethical conduct of qualitative research. In the context of European Commission funding, the demands of research ethics and integrity place a tremendous responsibility on the supervisors of early-stage researchers involved in cross-national projects. This document study seeks to illuminate the role of the supervisors in facilitating research ethics in these projects. Specifically, we describe and discuss the supervisor role associated with five approaches to doctoral supervision of qualitative research, namely those described as ‘Functional’, ‘Enculturation’, ‘Critical thinking’, ‘Emancipation’ and ‘Developing a quality relationship’. The main challenges for supervisors of cross-national research projects are the cultural and linguistic mobilisation of ethical principles in qualitative research processes and the management of the future use of open data. The results from this study have implications for planning and conducting cross-national studies within research involving human participants. These results can guide supervisors in the codification and mobilisation of ethical qualitative research in practice.

Developing and evaluating Compassionate Workplace Programs to promote health and wellbeing around serious illness, dying and loss in the workplace (EU-CoWork): a transdisciplinary, cross-national research project

Background: Most employees will experience serious illness, caregiving, dying and loss (End-of-Life (EoL) experiences) at multiple points throughout their working lives. These experiences impact affected employees but also their colleagues in terms of health and wellbeing, and the workplace as a whole in terms of workplace safety, productivity and labour relations. The impact of EoL experiences on employees means that workplaces are called to play a more active role in providing support for EoL experiences. Aim: To describe how the EU-CoWork (2024–2028) project addresses its main aims to (1) create Compassionate Workplace cultures, practices and policies and improve health and wellbeing for employees dealing with EoL experiences in different national work contexts in Europe; (2) describe and evaluate the process of co-creation and implementation of Compassionate Workplace Programs (CWPs) and how these influence the programs’ outcomes. Design: EU-CoWork employs a facilitated and co-creative Developmental Evaluation approach to the development of 12 tailored CWPs across four European countries (Belgium, Austria, Sweden and Greece). Methods: To evaluate the outcomes and processes leading to these outcomes, a mixed-methods Realist Evaluation methodology is applied, formulating and testing Context-Mechanism-Outcomes configurations and combining longitudinal quantitative and qualitative data collections. Results: EU-CoWork will generate evidence to support an expanded model of occupational health and safety risk factors sensitive to the specific challenges related to employees’ EoL experiences. In doing so, several challenges will have to be navigated: involving employees with EoL experiences while avoiding overburdening them, avoiding tokenistic engagement, managing power differentials, balancing the need for scientific rigour with the flexibility required in co-creation, reconciling different epistemologies and disciplinary traditions and organisational resistance to change. Conclusion: There are potential long-lasting broader societal impacts through the stimulation of open discourse on EoL topics, the reconciliation of work and care, and changes in gendered work and care patterns.

Developmental assets, creativity, thriving, and mental health among Malaysian emerging adults.

This study was part of a larger cross-national research project at the Norway’s University of Bergen, which involved participants from over 30 countries. This undertaking delves into developmental assets, creativity, and thriving, and the part they play in determining mental health. Thus, this study examined the developmental assets (internal assets: support, empowerment, boundaries, and expectations and creative use of time; external assets: commitment to learning, positive identity, positive values, and social competencies), creativity, thriving, and their importance to mental health in a sample of Malaysian emerging adults. This study was based on a sample of 394 undergraduate students, comprising 264 females and 130 males, ranging between the ages of 18 and 26 years (M = 21.5). Two subscales of the Reisman diagnostic creativity assessment (RDCA) were used to measure creativity (originality and fluency). Meanwhile, thriving indicators of Search Institute were used to measure thriving while the short form of the mental health continuum (MHC-SF) for adolescents was used to measure mental health. An online Google form was used to collect data from university students enrolled in both public and private universities. The correlation analysis results revealed that all the variables were positively correlated to each other and that the relationship between development assets, creativity, thriving, and mental health ranged from weak to moderate. Multiple regression (stepwise) analysis produced four models that indicated that positive identity, support, creativity, and thriving have a significant influence on mental health among emerging adults. Further, analyses using the PROCESS procedure demonstrated significant indirect effects of positive identity and support on mental health through its effects on creativity and thriving. As such, it is our recommendation that mental health practitioners tailor their treatment approach to include positive identity, support, creativity, and thriving in their sessions with Malaysian emerging adults.

Where I Belong: Identification Processes of Young Volunteers in Super-Diverse Cities

In the context of super-diverse cities, scholars and policy makers are increasingly interested in the potential of volunteering to establish identification for newcomers and locals alike. In this paper, we address the question of how young volunteers in Rotterdam and Vienna negotiate belonging within their super-diverse surroundings. Our exploratory study builds on a cross-national research project in which we collected qualitative interview data from volunteering youth. We follow a weak-theory approach and conceptualise belonging as emotional, procedural, and relational. We trace identification processes of newcomers and locals in terms of belonging through volunteering in urban contexts of super-diversity. Our paper demonstrates that volunteering serves as a vehicle for feelings of belonging and inclusion for young volunteers, specifically addressing the urban super-diversity of Vienna and Rotterdam. Our research also indicates the partiality and temporality of volunteering as a source of belonging and the function of volunteering as a structure of inclusion, not necessarily enabling structural inclusion.

Introducing Offlineness: Theorizing (Digital) Literacy Engagements

In this Insights essay, we propose a new concept of offlineness that builds on current language around digital practices, yet addresses an element of young people’s experience that is not adequately represented in current research or educational discourse. This work is informed by a recent cross-national arts-based research project that highlighted the limitations of the discourse ascribed to the nature of young people’s engagement with digital literacies. We propose a (re)theorization, which builds on a critical review of current conceptual research and digital commentaries. Theorizing offlineness as a continuum between online and offline practices is tantamount to a paradigm shift toward more nuanced understandings of young people’s digital practices. It offers researchers and educators a more precise way to speak to young people’s digital experiences, providing a productive tool to (re)construct learning and inquiry spaces in literacy research and education.

WORKING LONGER FOR ACADEMICS IN THE U.S. AND IRELAND: A GENDERED LIFECOURSE ANALYSIS

Many governments including the US and Ireland have been advocating longer working lives for all workers to ensure pension sustainability in the light of population ageing. Policy changes encouraging increased social security/state pensions age reflect this. However, there has been limited investigation of how the gender implications of these policy changes. While longer working lives may be attractive for some workers, there is evidence that women and men have profoundly different work-life trajectories and women may be more financially disadvantaged approaching retirement age. There is a need to explore how this affects their ability and/or desire to continue working past traditional retirement age and their financial security. This presentation is based on analysis of evidence from an EU-funded cross-national research project involving work-life history interviews conducted with forty older workers in academia in the US and Ireland in 2016 and 2017. A lifecourse approach is used to analyse interview data from ten male and ten female academics in Ireland and ten male and ten female academics in the US, aged 50 or over. Participants discussed early influences, work-life history and health concerns. The paper uses a cumulative disadvantage perspective to analyse how gender, family and health trajectories across the life course affect and can limit options around late work and retirement. It concludes that gender differences regarding norms of care-giving are important and that extending working life is more likely to be caused by financial necessity for women. The implications for future research and policy are discussed.

Post-PhD researchers’ experiences: an emotionally rocky road

PurposeThis study aims to examine how post-PhD researchers construct their identities through significant work experiences as they endeavour to develop their research independence and a distinct scholarly profile. The authors were especially interested in how they made meaning of their important work experiences, the ones that were emotionally salient.Design/methodology/approachUsing a narrative approach, the analysis was conducted on a data subset from a large cross-national mixed-methods research project about early-career researchers’ identity development. The sample included 71 post-PhD researchers from the UK who completed an online survey. Ten of whom were also interviewed through a semi-structured protocol.FindingsPost-PhD researchers considered work experiences to be significant when those experiences helped them to gauge whether their self-representation as researchers was coherent and a further research career was practicable. The same type of significant event (e.g. publishing in a prestigious journal) could hold different meanings depending on who experienced it. Positive experiences helped to maintain their motivation and made them feel that they were consolidating their identities. Negative experiences tended to challenge their sense of identity and their sense of belonging to academia. Whereas positive feelings towards a significant experience appeared to persist over time, negative feelings seemed to fade or evolve through self-reflection, but ultimately had greater saliency.Originality/valueFew previous studies have been conducted on how emotionally powerful work experiences influence post-PhD researchers’ identity development. Besides highlighting how emotions and feelings, often-neglected aspects of identity development, influence the process, this study offers a constructive – and, in some ways, alternative – view of the impact that negative experiences have on their identity development.

Advancing electronic monitoring in Scotland: Understanding the influences of localism and professional ideologies

Scotland has one of the highest prison population rates in western Europe, coinciding with a recent growth in interest in electronic monitoring (EM) as a potential mechanism for diversion and decarceration. Scotland also has a relatively sophisticated suite of community sanctions and measures – from which court-imposed and prison-imposed EM orders have, for 15 years, been largely kept separate, until now. There are plans for integration, with new EM technologies and modalities to be introduced. This article analyses the perspectives of Scottish practitioners and decision-makers regarding current stand-alone uses of EM, canvassing relevant jurisdictional findings from within a larger European cross-national comparative research project. It reveals localised, institutional and professional differences in the Scottish criminal justice field. Our analysis demonstrates that Scottish practitioners want more integration in principle, but forewarns that the extent of their support may partly depend on how and by whom this is done in practice.

Exploring Adolescent Sexual Behaviour: A Pilot Study of Questions for Inclusion in the Health Behaviour in School Aged Children (HBSC) Study

Objective: The Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study is a World Health Organization collaborative cross-national research project which aims to improve understanding of young people’s health and wellbeing, including sexual behaviours. Data are collected on a four year cycle from schoolchildren in 43 countries in Europe and North America. Requests for detailed information about adolescent sexual behaviours have prompted the development of new sexual behaviour questions for use in the HBSC study. The aim of this pilot study was to provide guidance on the utility and appropriateness of new sexual health items for inclusion in future HBSC studies. Design and Method: A pilot involving 233 Irish students aged 15-19 years used questionnaires and classroom discussion groups to test the utility and appropriateness of new sexual health items. Twenty-one sexual behaviour questions were developed based on previously validated questionnaires. Questions measured sexual behaviour, romantic experiences and the circumstances surrounding first intercourse. Results: The findings provide feedback on the following dimensions of the proposed items; cultural acceptability, understandability, answerability, skews, translatability, relevance and contextual understanding. A test-retest provides further details on the validity and consistency of the questions. Analysis highlights questions which not only have conceptual cohesion within the study and the potential to inform policy but which are understandable, acceptable and of a high priority to the target population. Conclusions: The findings have provided guidance for the mandatory and optional sexual behaviour questions for further HBSC studies. They have informed a standardized protocol which will enable the collection of internationally comparable adolescent sexual behaviour data.

Prevention in social work: the final frontier?

The concept of ‘prevention’ presents many enduring dilemmas for social work. There have been noteworthy attempts to develop policies and practices that can enable ‘prevention’, but these have been frustrated by uncertainty about what constitutes prevention, and how to manage the tension between prevention and responding to crisis. There have been numerous successful prevention projects in the UK, the United States and Europe, but hitherto few of the lessons appear to have been incorporated into mainstream services. In an age of advanced marginality, the mainstream remains preoccupied with protection and risk management. In this article the core theoretical ideas underpinning the ‘paradox of prevention’ debate are examined alongside initial findings from a cross-national research project with practitioners in two European welfare states. This indicates why, in the post Baby Peter era, it has proved difficult to translate good policy intentions into effective practice and how prevention as the final frontier might be reached.

Entanglements of Economic and Intimate Citizenship: Individualization and Gender (In)Equality in a Changing Europe

This paper contributes to the ongoing refinement of citizenship as a feminist concept through the development of understandings of the relationship between economic and intimate citizenship in contemporary Europe. It draws on two cross-national research projects that each focus on a group of people who might be thought to be affected by particular processes of individualization: the economic “activation” of large numbers of women in increasingly deregulated labour markets, and the progressive detraditionalization of intimate life. The paper examines patterns of intimate life and citizenship that accompany employment in the elder care sector, and patterns of economic life and citizenship that accompany the experience of living outside the conventional family. It argues that there are significant and hitherto unrecognized tensions between “flexible jobs and the ability of individuals to exercise agency as intimate citizens. It suggests that it is difficult to flourish as an intimate citizen without enjoying a degree of economic autonomy, and that economic autonomy is elusive for women working in the most deregulated sectors of the labour market. It also points to the important role that social policies play in mediating the relationship between intimate and economic citizenship.

International migration and economic participation in small towns and rural areas – cross-national evidence

This paper analyses the neglected labour market experiences of international migrants to non-metropolitan areas, mainly drawing on the evidence of a large, cross-national research project on immigration, as well as on other available research evidence. By examining migrants’ employment experiences in four different countries – Canada, the USA, Ireland and Scotland – we are able to discuss key themes and consider them from a comparative perspective. The focus here is on the frequent occurrence of different forms of underemployment of rural migrants; issues around pay and working conditions; and the importance of welcoming communities.

Web campaigning in the 2009 European Parliament elections: A cross-national comparative analysis

Political communication has transformed drastically since the Internet made its way into the political arena. Political parties seem unable to do without a website or a social networking profile any longer, particularly in election campaigns. One of the many approaches to studying online political communication is measuring specific website features political parties, politicians and candidates utilize in order to engage visitors in the political process. Even though the analysis of online political communication has evolved over the years, website-feature analysis is still a valid instrument to study political actors. The explanations sought to understand website-feature utilization are found in earlier cross-national comparative studies (technological and human development) as well as new ones (political systems characteristics, ideology, participation and engagement). This study looks back on two prior cross-national comparative research projects and reports on a cross-national comparative analysis of 1026 candidate and party websites from 17 countries participating in the European Parliament (EP) elections of 2009. To analyze these data, some methodological improvements are made compared to earlier studies.

Researching women's movements: An introduction to FEMCIT and Sisterhood and After

This article offers an overview of two research projects that are concerned with investigating the histories, social organisation and impacts of women's movements. It introduces FEMCIT (Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: the impact of contemporary women's movements), a transdisciplinary, cross-national European research project, and Sisterhood and After, a UK-based oral history project, outlining their specific research questions, foci and research designs. The article raises a number of key issues that arise in researching women's movements that are then taken up in the eight paired papers that follow: method and research design; difference and diversity; place, space and nation; and understanding impact.

Comparing local strategies and practices: recollections from two qualitative cross-national research projects

The article is based on methodological reflections and recollections from two qualitative cross-national research projects, one of them comparing Finland and Scotland, and the other one Scotland and Spain. One of them was a case-oriented study of local regeneration strategies in two cities, while the other one used an ethnographic approach for the study of local practices on maternity and child healthcare services. The article is based on the authors’ dialogue and it contributes to the discussion about the value of a qualitative approach in cross-national comparisons and its place in the field of comparative research. It points at its advantages in enabling the analysis of societies and their specific features from inside to recognize cultural and social contexts, but it also draws attention to some specific problems and challenges concerning qualitative cross-national research by providing concrete examples from the two pieces of research.

The moderating effect of institutional context on the relationship between associational activity and new business activity in emerging economies

Varying institutional environments provide the foundation for a great deal of international business (IB) research yet relatively little empirical work has examined the association between institutional factors and new business development in emerging economies, although the importance of new business development for economic transition and growth is widely acknowledged. Drawing from social network and institutional theories, we address this gap by examining the effect of associational activity on the level of new business activity in emerging economies, and testing the thesis that associational activity becomes more instrumental for new business creation when aspiring entrepreneurs confront higher institutional burdens (i.e., obstacles derived from underdeveloped or absent institutions). On the basis of data from two cross-national research projects—the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and the World Values Survey—we find a positive relationship between a country's associational activity and new business activity; this relationship is stronger for higher regulatory and normative institutional burdens and lower cognitive institutional burdens. This study is among the first to examine empirically the possible substitution effect between social ties and institutions to predict new business activity; it paints a nuanced picture of how social networks might be more instrumental in contexts characterized by weak institutions. We discuss the implications of these findings for IB theory and practice and offer directions for further research in the area.

Queering Representation: Ethics and Visibility in Research

This article explores some of the ethical and epistemological dilemmas that arose from a cross-national research project on lesbian motherhood in two European countries, Sweden and Ireland. The differing contexts for sexual citizenship presented particular challenges in relation to negotiating wider norms regarding visibility. Lesbian mothers in Sweden presented a discourse of openness that strongly advocated visibility and the importance of social research in contributing to social change. In contrast to their Swedish counterparts, lesbian mothers in Ireland were more constrained in their efforts to negotiate their claims via visibility and this led to complex choices for the researcher, particularly in relation to contact with popular media.

Comparative Gender and Policy Projects in Europe: Current Trends in Theory, Method and Research

This paper examines nine cross-national research projects on gender and policy in Europe at different stages of completion. In the first part of the paper, the infrastructure, analytical foci, methodological approach theoretical framework and policy relevance are examined for each project. General research findings are presented in cases where projects have been completed. In the second part of the paper, a composite profile is presented from the European-based projects across seven shared features with an eye toward identifying current trends in feminist comparative policy as a field of study.

Restructuring Territoriality: Europe and the United States Compared

Restructuring Territoriality: Europe and the United States Compared. Edited by Christopher K. Ansell and Guiseppe di Palma. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 316p. 24.99 paper.This interesting and thought-provoking book, based on a cross-national research project involving both U.S. and European scholars, provides a sustained meditation on the “restructuring of territoriality” in both the United States and the European Union. From initial starting points, such as John Ruggie's “unbundling of territoriality” and other writing on the challenges to the modern state system, from domestic privatization to globalization, the authors focus on the contemporary challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state and the rebundling of territoriality associated with the development of the EU, reflecting a central concern with how the relationship between territory and governance is changing.

Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa

This book is a fascinating exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a comprehensive cross-national survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans think about democracy and market reform, subjects on which almost nothing is otherwise known. The authors find that support for democracy in Africa is wide but shallow and that Africans feel trapped between state and market. Beyond multiparty elections, people want clean and accountable government. They will accept economic structural adjustment only if it is accompanied by an effective state, the availability of jobs, and an equitable society. What are the origins of these attitudes? Far from being constrained by social structure and cultural values, Africans learn about reform on the basis of knowledge, reasoning, and experience. Weighing supply and demand for reform, the authors reach cautious conclusions about the varying prospects of African countries for attaining fully-fledged democracy and markets.0