Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

aises important questions for comparative education researchers
about their moral responsibilities as researchers and practitioners.
He starts by pointing out that in an increasingly globalized world
whose urban environments are hence more multicultural in nature,
what is right or good or true is frequently disputed from different
cultural perspectives. This raises difficult questions about the ethics of
comparative education research: what is the comparative education
researcher to conclude, for example, in a cross-cultural study of rural
schooling practices when she finds that in one jurisdiction there are
policies in place to improve the retention of girls in the system, and
that in another the prevailing cultural beliefs frown on the schooling
of girls? She cannot avoid the normative issues if her study is to be
more than just descriptive, and the question arises as to how she might
conclude, if indeed she does, that the policies in the former case would
do much to enhance the life chances of girls in the latter. In this article
he develops core ethical principles, which he calls the ethics of integrity,
in comparative education research which could be both foundational
to the practice of research, and applicable universally to all researchers.
To get there he considers a dominant contemporary perspective on
ethics, postmodern ethics, finding in it aspects of intuitionist ethics, and
building out of the minimal assumptions associated with these moral
perspectives core ethical principles not only for a code of ethics in
comparative education research, but for any professional code of ethics.
In her study of “third-culture kids” (TCKs) – those who have
spent a significant part of their formative years outside their parents’
culture – Miriam Hasofer asks whether Third Culture Theory suffers
from the Fallacy of Subjective Personal Validation. Her study is a good
example of one of the many uses of comparative education research
methodology, and will be of interest to many expatriate parents
working in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia (and indeed globally),
whose children are growing up in a ‘second culture’, and are, according
to the theory, developing a ‘third culture’ in terms of which they
construct their identities. She compares and contrasts the experiences of
a group of non-TCKs with those of a group of TCKs, identifying points
of divergence and convergence in their experiences. Bearing in mind
the exploratory nature of her study, these points of common junction
are not presented as conclusive evidence for judging the credibility
of the Third Culture phenomenon. Rather, they provide a framework
within which to construct a more detailed study to test the validity of
the suppositions and empirical claims of Third Culture Theory.
One of the fields most strongly associated with the research
methods of comparative education is that of international educational
development. This involves research in developing countries and regions,
often associated with the United Nations’ Millenium Development
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