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

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 679
nine countries in 1949, the study reported on in the volume How Nations See
Each Other.
These early efforts did not generate a long-term programme. Large-scale
survey research across a number of countries demanded a complex administra-
tive apparatus, and the studies themselves came under criticism for their ten-
dency to pursue abstract comparisons without consideration of the historical
contexts and the structural conditions of particular response constellations. By
the mid-fifties, the UNESCO Social Sciences Department was becoming more and
more involved in promoting training and research in the developing countries,
and found it increasingly difficult to pursue explicitly comparative studies.
An attempt was made in 1956 to launch a programme of comparative
surveys, but this proved difficult to get under way. A small four-nation study
was in fact organized but it was soon realized that this was the wrong tack.90
In a sense the current efforts to advance cross-national research grew out of
this realization of failure. It became increasingly obvious that UNESCO could
use its limited funds much more effectively if, instead of organizing fresh
comparative studies from zero, it concentrated its efforts on what might be
called the infrastructure of comparative research: if it took on as a long-term
task the establishment of better facilities for research workers interested in
cross-cultural or cross-national analysis of one type or another. This, at least
in the initial stage, meant a concentration on methods, on sources of informa-
tion, on access to data for analysis. This new line found its first expression
in the UNESCO programme for 1961-1962. All scholars interested in the ad-
vancement of comparative research have reason to be grateful to T. €I. Marshall,
to the late AndrC Bertrand and to Samy Friedman for their efforts to make
this new departure administratively acceptable within the UNESCO framework.
The International Social Science Council was given a central role in the devel-
opment and execution of the new programme. The Council decided to devote
the first set of conferences under the programme mainly to quantitative methods
of comparison. The conference held at La Napoule on the C6te d'Azur in June,
1962, developed ideas on comparative survey researchg', and the conference at
Yale University in September, 1963, focused on aggregate national statistics
and the possibilities of correlational analyses using nations as ~nits.9~
Both these lines have been pursued in subsequent conferences and publica-
tions. Work in the field of comparative survey data has concentrated on prob-
lems of data access, data archives, data retrieval.93 Work on aggregate corn-
parisons has been pursued in two directions.The Yale Conference recommended
that the approach developed in the Russett, et al. World Handbook of Political
and Social Indicators be discussed in detail within each major region of the
world in order to ensure broader coverage, better evaluations and more realistic
analyses of the data at hand. A first regional conference under the programme
was organized at Buenos Aires in September, 1964,94 and a second in March,
1967, in New Delhi. The Yale Conference also recommended that data pro-
grammes of the type developed by Deutsch and Russett should be supplemented
by within-nation ecological archives to allow studies of the sources of variations
between different types of localities and between advanced and backward