Chapter 8: Teaching Cross-Cultural Research Methods

Cross-cultural research enjoys a seemingly never ending increase in interest in psychology and related disciplines (Van de Vijver, 2006, 2013). This increase creates tremendous opportunities for the field, but is also comes with challenges. This chapter describes the practices and challenges in my career teaching cross-cultural research methods. Research methods are often part of more general courses in cross-cultural psychology. In fact, cross-cultural research has been described as primarily a method (Berry, 1969), although the field has moved since in a direction in which substance and method each play their own role in the advancement of the field.

I have been teaching quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Most challenges are met when teaching quantitative methods. The starting point of my teaching is that the field of cross-cultural research is served best by a non-dogmatic view on research methods in which research questions dictate the choice of methods, arguing that there is no a priori reason to shy away from qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. This idea is surprisingly easy to convey in workshops on test adaptations. It is easy to convey the idea that initial stages of test adaptations are often qualitative/ethnographic where later stages use more formal, quantitative approaches. It is important to note that students and participants of workshops are frequently in the beginning of their career and are often still flexible and pragmatic in the choice of methods.