Review of "Performing qualitative cross-cultural research" and Cross-cultural research methods."
Author(s):
Ratner, Carl
Format:
Book review
Citation:
Qualitative Research In Psychology, Volume 9, Issue 4 (2012-10). pp. 371-374.
Language:
English
Abstract:
Reviews the books, Performing Qualitative Cross-Cultural Research by P. Liamputtong (2010) and Cross-Cultural Research Methods edited by D. Matsumoto and F. Van de Vijver (2010). Qualitative methodology, defined as the relation between psychology and culture, is vital for cultural psychology because it can apprehend the fullness of culture that is embodied in cultural and psychological phenomena. Simplified, standardized, fragmented, overt, superficial measures used by positivists cannot accomplish this. This difference is revealed in these two books. Liamputtong (p. 5) summarizes an ethnographic study of mental disturbance in a Hmong woman, Mia that captures the cultural basis and quality of the symptom. This case study elicited and respected the cultural belief system that generated and informed Mai’s symptoms. This cultural factor is shown to be an organic constituent of the symptom. Positivistic cross-cultural psychology follows an opposite tack. Bond and Van de Vijver explain that cultural factors are nebulous and must be replaced as explanations of psychology by more definite, proximal “moderator variables.” Liamputtong’s book is a readable, nontechnical account of the social and political aspects of qualitative methodology for cultural psychology. It explains how the methodology gives voice to indigenous people, and should be used in consultation with them to illuminate their life style so as to empower them. In contrast, Matsumoto and Van de Vijver’s book is a technical presentation of positivistic procedures. The book is suitable for professional social scientists already committed to these procedures as it unreflexively treats them as given methods that require no justification in terms of epistemological or ontological principles. The book has little to offer to qualitative methodologists and maintains the traditional insularity of positivism to qualitative methodology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)