Abstract
This paper details the challenges researchers with the International Resilience Project encountered investigating resilience across cultures and contexts. The paper recounts the experiences of the global team who came together to develop a culturally embedded methodology to study resilience in fourteen communities on five continents. The team sought to better understand the phenomenon of resilience and in that process to examine critically the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how to conduct cross-cultural social research. Specifically, the incongruity between Western research paradigms and indigenous forms of knowledge generation created three unique challenges: adapting research methods to different cultures, ensuring construct validity across sites, and resolving epistemological and methodological tensions.