The researcher/interviewer in intercultural context: a social intruder!

Abstract

The search for improved understanding in cross‐cultural contexts is resulting in a correspondingly high increase in cross‐cultural studies in diverse fields and disciplines. Globalization, economic universalism and internationalization of technology, as well as increased international mobility, immigration and relocation accelerated by the communication explosion, are drawing the world closer, but with an increasing awareness of differences, particularly across the given historical and eco‐political divides. The challenge to research is to communicate meaningfully across these divides. This article explores the issues surrounding cross‐cultural interviewing. Against the backdrop of growing emphasis on cross‐cultural research, there is an emerging need to reconsider interviewing as a research tool with a focus on the interview participants' subjectivities and the subsequent interplay with data collection and making meaning. This entails a recognition of the deep consequences of culture — the embedded patterns of behaviour and the processes of making meaning — and the significance of how these impact on doing research across cultures.

Notes

University of Leicester, School of Education, 21 University Road, Leicester LEI 7RF, UK. Email: [email protected]

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Jessica Jacobson mentions issues in researching across religions including suspicions and mistrust of the young respondents and their parents.

Here I am referring particularly to family structures and relationship networks in collective societies such as pakistan (Shah, 1998), China (Dimmock, 2002), India (Sharma, 1980), and other eastern cultures, where ‘obligations’ and ‘obedience’ emerge as complex phenomena impacting on relationships in different contexts. This point is further explained in the next section with reference to my data collection in Pakistan.

Both discuss the ‘problem of suitable space for interviewing men’ and the issue of ‘interviewing men alone’—one in a Muslim society and the other in a non‐Muslim context in the Indian subcontinent, pointing to regional cultural norms.

This study was carried out while working in Pakistan in a senior academic and managerial position.

My only earlier contact with the British culture and education system was during my one‐year stay for M.Ed. at the University of Manchester, about nine years before this study.