Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

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Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 649
N N N tural, medical, economic, administra-
tive, political) tend to come close to the
same mode: the data are simply collated
from the available sources within one
single research centre and no serious
attempt is made at consulting ‘native’
scholars in the later stages of processing
and interpretation.
International N N This is the ‘imperialist’ mode: the design
is decided, and analysis and interpretation
pursued within one centre in
one ‘leader’ nation while the actual data
gathering is carried out by some international
network of field organizations.
Most cross-national sample surveys so
far carried out have been in this mode:
a scholar or a research centre in a
wealthy country ‘buys’ data from a
range of less fortunate countries.4
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I I
Z
N
N This is the ‘replicative’ mode: a design
or research instrument developed in one
country is imported to another country
and the two sets of collected data are
compared in detail. Major examples in-
clude the series of replications of the
British studies of occupational rank and
intergenerational mobility under the
auspices of the first Research Com-
mittee of the International Sociological
Association;S the large set of replica-
tions of the ‘F (for Fascism) scale’
initially developed in California by the
authors of The Authoritarian Personal-
ity;6 the increasing number of cross-
national replications of the MCCLEL-
LAND %Achievement’ tests and of the
OSGOOD Semantic Differential tech-
niques.’
N These are cases of ‘regression to the
single-nation mode’ : initial internation-
al cooperation in design and data
gathering but disruption of communica-
tions at the later stages of processing. A