What Language Shall I Borrow?

WHAT LANGUAGE SHALL I BORROW? LISTENING, THINKING AND RETELLING IN CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH 

Introduction

Cross-cultural research involves interpretation and translation. It requires us to enter into a foreign world, with all its presuppositions and cultural frameworks, and draw from that world insights, findings and stories that not only respect and honour the world they came from, but also make sense to those outside that world, to those of us who are the foreigners. 

Read the full lecture below or download (Word 87KB)  What_Language_Shall_I_Borrow.doc

In his book The Truth About Stories, Native American scholar and writer Thomas King (2003:153-4) makes the following comment:

For Native storytellers, there is generally a proper place and time to tell a story. Some stories can be told any time. Some are told only in winter when snow is on the ground or during certain ceremonies or at specific moments in a season. Others can only be told by particular individuals or families. So when Native stories began appearing in print, concern arose that the context in which these stories had existed was in danger of being destroyed and the stories themselves were being compromised. The printed word, after all, once set on a page, has no master, no voice, no sense of time or place.

Research is about listening to stories, thinking about those stories and telling and re-telling those stories. Perhaps it’s the story that data is showing us; perhaps it’s other people’s stories. Cross-cultural research demands particular attention to stories; it demands the use of a particular language – or languages; at the very least, it should prompt us, as researchers, to question whether our language and our way of seeing the world, is the best way to see things, the best way to interpret other people’s stories.

So, in this lecture, I want to talk to you about three stories. Each of these three stories will draw on three elements of cross-cultural research, three different forms and languages: listening, thinking, and re-telling. Sure, there will be other criterion that marks cross-cultural research out; they’ll be other modes, methods and means that are used by researchers. But, here, I want to devote my time to just these three: listening, thinking, and re-telling. In this lecture I’m going to devote my comments to issues pertaining mainly to research methods rather than research findings. For more information on the research findings of the research projects I’m discussing, I’d direct you to the publications that came from these research projects.

But before I begin to tell these stories: a cautionary note. Research that listens, thinks and re-tells stories without a critical ear, a discerning thought, and a wise re-telling, may, in fact, be merely perpetuating myths and telling tall-stories. New Zealand historian Judith Binney (2001:2-3) expresses something of the historian’s task in undertaking research; the same comments – in broad terms at least – applies to all research.

Reworking the past uncovers old lodes and deep mineshafts, the veins of information that have been closed off, both wittingly and unwittingly, by those who lived before us. Memory is one form of transmitting human knowledge, but historical memory can be slippery and deceptive; it selects, conflates and sometimes reworks according to what it wants to have happened; it alters the actors and even changes the plot. In like manner, documents vanish and are deliberately destroyed; lovers and enemies alike write tales to shape the past according to their personal vision. Bureaucrats keep files; bureaucrats lose files; bureaucrats’ burn files, as does happenstance. The historians’ craft is to tease out the large narratives from those competing versions, missing parts, and conflicting ‘truths’.

So our story-telling is not without some borders; the languages we employ are not without their precedents. Recognising that we cannot accept everything we hear or see without some judgement, conscious or otherwise, let’s begin with the first task of research: listening.

Listening to the Story

It is all to easy to have predetermined notions of what we want to say and find when we come to research. Of course, we will bring hypotheses to research; we will want to test our expectations. The challenge though is to remain open to the research surprising us. The challenge is to remain vigilant in our listening to those stories; perhaps we are even required to train ourselves to listen to these particular stories: to equip ourselves with a particular language or cultural understanding. The joke goes is that if you ever find yourself in an African village, you’ll find the Mum, Dad, children, cattle and a French anthropologist. Sometimes listening to the story means immersing ourselves in it. Sometimes it means asking people to tell a story for the very first time, as I found in a research project I undertook on international students experiences’ of re-entry into their countries of origin.

Research: Re-entry of International Students

Research told us a lot about migrants in New Zealand; there was even some, although fairly dated, research that told us about international students’ experiences in New Zealand. But there was nothing of the type of research I was wanting to do that told us about international students’ returning to their countries of origin (see Butcher, 2003). International literature told us about the re-entry of those in the army and diplomatic Corp, but nothing told us about Asian students returning to their environments from this antipodean part of the world.

In studying the experiences of international students, therefore, it was necessary to analyse the inter-connection and communication between the student and the various modes, peoples, cultures, nations, languages, apparatuses, experiences and controls that impacted upon the international student and to bring into that discussion the broader issues beyond just the individual student’s re-entry experiences. It was, to follow Said (1993:314), to “show how all representations are constructed” and, to follow Ward (1980:42), to reveal “the truth about people”.

But it also meant that I had to recognise that I would be researching a topic of which I had no personal experience. I had never lived abroad and therefore had never experienced re-entry. I was a white Pakeha male from Aotearoa New Zealand talking to Asian males and females in countries as diverse as Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. The story I was researching was not my story. The language I would be asking people to speak to me was not a language I personally understood. But, my defence to these very significant limitations was that I was telling their stories because, in most cases, the students would not tell them for themselves. But before I told their stories, I first had to listen to them. And I had to find those who would be willing for me to listen.

Finding those who would have me listen to their stories was an easier task than I imagined it would be. I was very often the first person who had approached them and asked them to tell me of their experiences.

Issues of Methodology

Listening to these particular stories required a particular methodology. Connell and King (1999; cf. King et al, 1995)) note that individuals’ testimonies are an important and vital part of understanding migration, and drawing on migrants’ stories, in a variety of forms, is becoming a key methodology in migration studies. Connell and King (1999:19) express it eloquently: “The simple power of the testimony of individual migrants is often stunning, capturing in a few words a whole world of meaning”, and “[t]he complexity of roots and routes, the meanings and metaphors of shifting identities and aspirations, are more evident in these creative forms than in most social surveys.”

Following this lead then, the interview was chosen as the most appropriate method for this exploratory research. My frequent collaborator, Terry McGrath, who wrote his Master’s thesis on a similar topic a few years’ before I embarked on my PhD, shared similar misgivings (1998:4):

It was decided to start with interviews with a survey…[because I had] a personal disquiet related to the literature on graduate re-entry. This was related to two factors. The first was that there were only a few studies available. These were based on surveys, the findings of which centred around survey questions which in themselves appeared to assume answers or restrict the range of possible answers. The second related to the fact that survey questions drew from understanding graduate re-entry within the literature. The literature, however, revealed that most information relating to graduate re-entry comes from understanding re-entry and entry of migrants, business personnel, aid workers, and missionaries, all of whom encountered different experiences of sojourn from students.

In short, for my purposes, surveys assumed too much. As it was, in this research, the questions asked changed slightly after the initial interviews, after it became clear that returnees emphasised areas that the questions had not or that the preliminary research had not anticipated.

Issues of legitimacy

But there was a greater issue at play here, which I alluded to earlier: my legitimacy in undertaking this type of research. Cross-cultural research brings these debates about who should write what about whom to the fore. Historian Alan Ward (1980) argues that the debate about who should write what should not rest on grounds of race, religion, or gender: to do so is openly deterministic, prescriptive of learning and imagination, and will tie us to either patterns of polemical thought or personal experience alone. That is not to ignore, of course, that the writer brings individual perceptions and judgments influenced by contemporary intellectual trends, or that this will affect their selection of what is and what is not important data (cf. Ward, 1980). We will return to this point in the third part of the lecture.

But there are benefits in an ‘outsider’ being involved of research of this kind. A number of the returnees’ interviewed  in this research spoke for the first time about their re-entry experiences; many of their responses were deeply personal and highly confidential, the apparent ‘objectivity’ of the researcher and the fact that the participants were unlikely to encounter the researcher again (and therefore potentially re-live their re-entry experiences as through the interview).

So listening in research requires us to think about how we listen and who we listen to. It also provokes us to think about what the benefits or disadvantages are of particular stories being listened to and the way in which they are listened to. 

Thinking the Story

Having listened to the story, we are then required to interpret it and to think it through. We need to interpret our research using a number of criterion: what other literature and research on a similar topic tells us; what external factors may be influencing research participants’ responses; what biases we may be bringing to the task as we listen to their stories; and what might not be told to us verbally, but might nevertheless be communicated in other non-verbal ways. Of course we need to listen openly to what we are told, but we are also – recall Judith Binney’s remark earlier – to listen with a discerning ear.

Research: Discrimination against Migrants and Refugees

So in this second part of my lecture, I want to draw on research I did with Andrew Trlin and Paul Spoonley on discrimination against migrants and refugees in New Zealand (Butcher et al, 2006).
 
Two stories about this research to begin: I remember heading up to the Northcote Community Centre in Auckland to interview migrants’ learning to speak English finding myself first, in front of the class teaching them English and, second, responding to an accusation by a New Zealand Pakeha that I had no right to be there or to research these migrants.

I remember equally strongly going to interview an Iraqi refugee at the Migrant and Refugee Centre in Epsom on the same day that the Americans started bombing Baghdad, in the second Gulf War, where this woman still had family. Needless to say that interview never took place. That woman understandably had quite different priorities than participating in my research project.

That the timing of this particular piece of research was overshadowed by the fall-out of the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 provided some interesting nuances to both the research’s execution and its findings. Interviewing Middle Eastern refugees in Christchurch, I heard of how they changed their names, or asked their children to deny their nationality, because they had so often been asked in malice, by New Zealanders, whether they were related to Osama bin Laden; or told that, because they were from Afghanistan, they must be terrorists.

Thinking the story of cross-cultural research took on a particular poignancy for this research. It also meant thinking, deliberately reflecting, about what the role of a researcher was in this context. I heard and saw things for which I was ill-equipped to respond to. For the research participants’ protection as much as my own, we ensured that we always identified where these migrants and refugees could go to if they wanted to discuss issues that had arisen in this research. On more than one occasion, conversations led to tears as migrants and refugees recalled their perceptions of discrimination in New Zealand.

Embarking on this research we followed the processes of going through gate-keepers, ensuring we had the support of those we were speaking to and about. But, nevertheless, we had great difficulty convening focus-groups.

Rather than replicate the efforts (i.e. national surveys and micro-level studies) of previous researchers, the decision was made to complement their efforts by using focus groups as the method for data collection. While focus groups can be notoriously difficult to organise and conduct, they nevertheless have several advantages. Amongst other advantages, focus groups provide:
 
“ready access to a potentially broad range of perspectives, rather than the restricted view of an individual or specific group; a setting that encourages participants to share (often similar) experiences as well as to challenge certain views or assumptions; and the opportunity to engage in constructive discussions on issues with the benefit of inputs from those with different backgrounds, experiences, knowledge and perspectives. If well organised and conducted, a focus group yields not only a rich body of information but may also be a learning experience for both the participants and the researcher(s) involved.” (Butcher, et al, 2006: 20)

Participant recruitment was undertaken via contacts made through migrant resource centres, language schools, the Migrant and Refugee Service, and personal contacts. Prospective participants were provided with details of the study as well as an official Information Sheet; these ensured that the research participants were properly informed about the research and the ethics committee requirements were met. A prospective participant’s decision to take part in the study on a voluntary basis was signalled by completion of a Consent Form again in accord with research ethics requirements.

The process of participant recruitment and focus group organisation proved to be more difficult than we expected for a variety of reasons. Overall, these recruitment difficulties may be summed up as a combination of: the unwillingness, lack of confidence and concerns of potential participants; the research design criteria for participant selection; the inability of the research team to convince some of those contacted or their communities to participate; and factors external to the immediate research situation and environment (Butcher et al, 2006:23).

Another issue we faced was who ultimately undertook the fieldwork of the research. The research team consisted of a Professor and Associate Professor and me. Not only, at that time, did I not have a PhD; I was also younger and less experienced than my colleagues. And I was the one doing the fieldwork. This presented some interesting perception issues. It’s not that I was not qualified to undertake the fieldwork, but some of the research participants read sending a relatively junior researcher to do the fieldwork as an indication of how important, or otherwise, we considered both this research and their particular views. In hindsight, it may have been wise to have had present my more senior colleagues, in order to add a certain gravitas to the work.

However, while we faced significant limitations for this research, we came to the conclusion that it did not, ultimately, have an entirely detrimental effect on the project. As we said in the report (Butcher et al, 2006:24):

On balance, the issues identified for participant recruitment and focus group facilitation lead to a key question. While focus groups have several advantages and while the information gained was informative and valuable, would it have been logistically easier, less time-consuming and more fruitful for a selection of key stakeholders and leaders in immigrant and refugee ethnic communities to be interviewed individually? Not necessarily. Many of the same issues would still have applied to securing suitable potential interviewees and the researcher’s perceived fitness for task. Moreover, the costs (of time, travel, accommodation etc.) to set up and interview as many individuals as were involved in the focus groups, and to then transcribe and analyse a significantly larger body of tape recorded information (say 20 interviews of at least an hour or more in duration) would have exceeded the research budget approved for the project as part of the current contract for the New Settlers Programme. As is often the case in the real world of research, as compared with the ideal world of textbook design and implementation, the researchers were obliged to do the best that they could under the circumstances. There are, of course, useful lessons to be learned here by researchers planning future projects, and it is hoped that the issues identified will also assist readers in their assessment and appreciation of the results presented.

You could say we both experienced and identified a ‘real-world’ pragmatism in doing this research. As I’ll demonstrate momentarily, this pragmatism has significant implications for how we re-tell the stories in our research. But they also impact how we think about cross-cultural research. We had a timeframe and a budget we had to meet; we did not have the luxury of endless negotiations with key stakeholders; nor, once the project had begun, could we easily replace the initial researcher and former Race Relations Commissioner, Rajen Prasad with someone of equal qualification and experience.

Cross-cultural research, then, is often about compromise. Sometimes that compromise is in recruiting research participants; other times, that compromise is forced upon us by external constraints or controls. In response to some of these constraints, Boston et al (2006:186) suggest a number of changes that would be required for diversity to be properly researched. These proposed changes are:

• “The collection of more detailed data, including data from longitudinal studies;
• A greater reliance on qualitative research;
• The analysis of social problems from a broader range of disciplinary perspectives, with more diverse research projects, premised on different assumptions, methods and analytical techniques;
• Placing more emphasis on distributions rather than averages and giving more attention to ‘controlling’ for variables such as ethnicity or gender when undertaking research; and
• Avoiding constraints on the funding of research that potentially reduce the range of eligible researchers (i.e. in terms of background and orientation).”

It’s not always possible to have an ideal research environment in which to work. Despite the best of intentions, there will often be limitations imposed and compromises made. The challenge for cross-cultural research, however, is to maintain both integrity in the research and respect in the thinking and telling of it.

Re-telling the Story

Having listened and thought about the story, we are then often called to re-tell it. For academics, re-telling that story is often in the form of academic journals or conferences, media which demand a particular type of story told in a particular sort of way. Here, rigour in theory and method is arguably more important than the research findings.

Research: Engaging Asian Communities in New Zealand

But, oftentimes in cross-cultural research, the issue is one of public re-telling. So it was in the most recent piece of research I was involved in, where three colleagues (McGrath, Pickering and Smith) and I were tasked to look at the engagement of Asian communities in New Zealand (McGrath et al, 2005).

I want to consider what it means to re-tell cross-cultural stories in any environment. What obligations to we have, as researchers, toward our research participants? Are we free to choose what we do and do not say? Are we free to frame our findings as we like, critique the stories we are told without reflection, and engineer recommendations to make them more palatable to our reader or our funder?

It is no small issue that in this, and other research, migrant communities were reluctant to participate, suffering from ‘research-fatigue’, untrusting of what would be done with their stories or whether they would ever hear again how the research they willingly gave their time for would be used.

However, in difference from the other research projects I’ve mentioned, in this research we used researchers’ from the same ethnic and cultural backgrounds as those that we were researching to facilitate the focus groups in the languages of its participants. We did this in order to try and remove as much cultural misunderstanding as possible. In total, we had 17 focus groups, with 49 participants, drawing on every major ethnic group in Asia. We supplemented these focus groups with interviews with representatives of these ethnic groups, as well as with those from ethnic backgrounds not necessarily represented in focus groups, like Nepalese.

Because we were undertaking this research for a quasi-government body, we were required to provide regular reports on our progress and submit drafts of material for review as it was written. One illustration is useful here. In our research we had come across both literature and comments from our research participants about Winston Peters and his particular immigration views. Our research was finishing just as the General Election of 2005 took place. When it became clear that Peters was to be appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs and, therefore, by proxy, Chairperson of the Board of this funding body, we were advised to remove any reference to him or his party’s policies on immigration from our report. Even though other researchers had written extensively about Winston Peters’, we could not.  

In fairness to this funding body, we managed to negotiate other concessions and retained a very collegial relationship, but this particular issue brought to the fore that we were not academics writing independent of research controls. We were on contract to an organisation that while promoting values that we, as researchers, largely adhered to, was nevertheless a research that received half its funding from the government. As the saying goes, don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

The role of research and new forms of governance

Particularly when research is under contract to a government, or quasi-government, funding body, there may be a number of factors influencing the type of knowledge that is to be produced. Sarantakos (1998:28) argues that ‘research is power that allows those who have access to it to control others; and the options for using that power are many’.

Rhodes (1994 and 1997) argues that state services have increasingly been contracted out, creating ‘governing without government’. This paradigm, ‘new public management’ is driven by neo-liberal economics, premised on the three ‘e’s of ‘efficiency, economy and effectiveness’. This ethos of management requires a range of accountability mechanisms and research, in its various forms, becomes the essential tool for demonstrating this accountability.

But the use of research in this way presents significant challenges for researchers, as Walters (2003:93) puts it:

The ability to explore and examine ‘the murk’ – forbidden terrains or those areas likely to unveil criticism of the government – may be prohibited by the gatekeepers of information or by contractual clauses that prevent the researcher delivering any material outside the desired product. From a government point of view, the close monitoring of research to ensure value for money is necessary for accountability. From the academic or independent researcher’s perspective, it can be viewed as the policing of knowledge, where the contract acts to legalize control and interference in the research.

Such control is systemised: for example, all researchers contracted by the Home Office are required to sign a declaration binding them to the provisions of the Official Secrets Act. Even contract research I have undertaken for a large government department required that I could tell nobody what I was doing or who I was doing it for.

Even before research begins, there are ethics committees within universities and professional organisations. Those undertaking health research, for example, often face a raft of ethics committees before commencing research. One senior academic once told me that ethics committee’s were designed to prevent research ever taking place. Walters (2003) suggests that any research that is ‘sensitive’ or, more particularly would potentially risk bringing the university into a bad light, or are even inconsistent with codes of conduct with commercial entities, will be refused by university ethics committees.

The ‘organic intellectual’

This control and governance of research presents some interesting and significant challenges for research. Cultural theorist Gramsci cautions against intellectuals endorsing the status quo without realizing it, “lending it a legitimation which it ought not to possess” (McGrath, 2002a:9), famously drawing the distinction between the “traditional intellectual” and the “organic intellectual”.

Briefly, Gramsci drew a sharp distinction between ‘domination’ (the direct coercion of society, such as you might find in a totalitarian state) and ‘hegemony’ (or the ideological control of society and the manipulation of its notion of consent). For Gramsci, that the dominant groups’ culture, ideas and morality appeared to be  the ‘natural order of things’ was in fact a manipulated and created appearance, designed to justify the interests of these dominant groups. Gramsci thus identified the importance of schools, churches, family and cultural associations as agencies by which these ideas and attitudes were shaped. He also, importantly, stressed the importance of the intellectual in creating a ‘counter-hegemony’; that is, a plausible view of reality which opposed the prevailing notions of the so-called ‘common sense’ which had, in fact, been manufactured and manipulated by society’s leaders (McGrath, 2002b). 

Gramsci, as we’ve noted, identifies ‘traditional intellectuals’ and ‘organic intellectuals’. ‘Traditional intellectuals’ regard themselves as being independent of the dominant social group; this perception is usually accepted by the population even though there is often blatant collusion between these intellectuals and the values of the dominant social group. By contrast, the ‘organic intellectual’, or intellectual activist, grows alongside and within the dominant social grouping, deliberately and actively assimilating their ideas and fulfilling the critical social role of being their thinking and organizing element. It is through this ‘organic intellectual’ group, Gramsci asserts, that the dominant social grouping maintains its hegemony over the remainder of society.

The development of a counter-hegemony, a counter world-view to the dominant view, requires two developments. First, the ‘traditional intellectuals’ must be encouraged, Gramsci says, to break their unacknowledged dependency upon, and collusion with, the dominant group and, second, the dominated group must produce its own ‘organic intellectuals’, who will purposefully articulate an alternative worldview and seek to gain acceptance of this worldview both inside and outside their own community. The ‘organic intellectual’ then, is more than just a scholar: he, or she, is an intellectual who emerge within a (dominated) community and give intellectual rigour and substance to its beliefs and values; they both counter the prevailing worldview and present a plausible alternative worldview.

An ‘organic intellectual’ is identified primarily in relation to his or her social function: the role that he or she plays in the worldview of his or her community, liberating it from the hegemony of the establishment, and projecting that worldview into the establishment in order to gain a consensus which will lead to transformation. Again, the ‘organic intellectual’ is an activist. In particular, it is through understanding and transforming popular culture, Gramsci would argue, that an alternative hegemony is generated (McGrath, 2002b).

This notion of ‘organic intellectuals’, being activists, presenting a counter-hegemony to the dominant discourse, may, Walters (2003:101) suggests, ultimately be counter-productive.

Many academics  see it as their responsibility to engage in public debate, to speak out against unjust or inconsistent political processes. Yet, the acquittal of the academic role, to be a critic and conscience of society, may be a hazardous undertaking, particularly if an academic is seeking to obtain government funding for research. The acquisition of a public profile through media appearances may confer an invisible branding of distrust on the outspoken academic by decision-making bodies. Even though a governing body may view the media comments as inoffensive, or indeed true, several government criminologists acknowledged that the regularity of academics ‘going public’ created an image of unreliability in the minds of officials, which acts to the detriment of the researcher’s future funding prospects.

Arguably, cross-cultural research faces further barriers. This is not to say that the ‘gate-keepers’ we identified earlier are not important in facilitating cross-cultural research; however, when those ‘gates’ are locked shut by the gate-keepers when that research is ultimately to be told, then the researcher faces a dilemma.

In his book Being Pakeha Now, historian Michael King writes almost a full chapter on the significant and, at times, vitriolic, resistance he faced to writing Maori history. It was not that King, per se, was not capable of writing history – he had ably demonstrated that he was – but that King was a Pakeha writing Maori history. King (1999:187) writes of it in these terms:

But the message I was now hearing with increasing frequency and clarity was this: Maori are in the process of taking control of Maori matters away from Pakeha gate-keepers; one area among many in which they want to exercise self-determination is writing about Maori history and culture; and the ultimate consequence of this pendulum swing is that Pakeha must vacate the field in favour of Maori researchers and writers. This view was one with which I had always been in sympathy. It represented an end point towards which my own work had been aimed. In journalism and in history, I had always regarded myself as a kawa korero in the Maori field – someone who worked in partnership with Maori and tried to carry Maori views to those who were not Maori and might otherwise be ignorant of such views. If this had an ultimate objective, it was to make the Pakeha majority more aware of Maori preoccupations, more sensitive to Maori values and more responsive to Maori needs. If there was a problem for me, it was that I had always been unwilling to relinquish this work entirely while the Pakeha majority still had much to learn and Maori writers were still to emerge in my field.

Certainly, virtually all the research projects I have been involved in on migrants and refugees have involved Pakeha New Zealanders. In my study on international students, I was the sole researcher, talking to people who, while sharing to varying degrees a common experience of what it meant to be in New Zealand, were nevertheless not of the same culture as me. In the study I did on the discrimination of migrants and refugees, I was one of three Pakeha male academics; though that was largely by consequence than planning. In the study on the engagement of Asian communities in New Zealand, while the four principal researchers’ were all Pakeha, our fieldwork was largely undertaken by those who were from the same cultural background as those we were researching, in their own languages. The executive summary was also translated into the languages of those that we studied.

Conclusion

So what language shall we borrow? Shall it be a language that provokes and provides a critic and conscience to society? Shall it be a language that challenges injustice or misinformation or manipulation? Shall it be a language that reveals the truth no matter how unpalatable that truth might be? Or shall it be a language that conceals and with-holds and presents a predetermined story? Shall it be a language that is as meaningless as if we had rather said nothing at all?

I have suggested here that there are three parts to cross-cultural research: listening, thinking and re-telling. But I have also sought to show that these three aspects are not without difficulty or complication. All research involves care and rigour, cross-cultural research especially so.

Listening is always the first part of cross-cultural research: listening without prejudice, without judgment, and with discernment. Sometimes, listening in research means asking people to tell their stories for the very first time. That requires particular care for researchers. There are also questions, which go across all these categories, about who has the right and legitimacy to listen, think and re-tell in cross-cultural research.

I have also sought to show that cross-cultural research demands care over our methodology of choice as well. Here, I have shown how three different methodologies operated – in-depth interviews in English, focus groups and interviews in the languages of those being researched, and focus groups in English. Each of these presents particular challenges.

Thinking the story means we need to realise the challenges we face with research fatigue, along with other expectations that research participants may bring to the project. As I’ve discussed, sometimes external events – like the terrorist attacks on America in 2001 – have a significant effect on our research. The challenge in thinking about cross-cultural research is how we choose to appropriately and flexibly respond to these challenges while maintaining the integrity of the research itself.

Re-telling the story, I have suggested, brings forth two issues: the role of research and new forms of governance, and the role of the ‘organic’ intellectual. When research is externally funded – even when it’s internally funded – there are issues over ownership and independence, particularly if the research findings are not what the funder expected. Furthermore, if the researcher takes an ‘activist’ role as an ‘organic’ intellectual, there are considerations around what cost this might incur for their future research work.

What language shall we borrow? I suggest it is a language that first listens, second thinks and third re-tells. And in so doing these three things, it is a language that brings together disparate words and varied speakers to tell a story: a story that we, as researchers, will have the privilege of being pat of. These stories are what cross-cultural research is all about. Generally, there is a proper place and time to tell a story: some can be told at any time; some can be told at winter, when the snow is on the ground; some are told only during certain ceremonies or at specific moments, or by particular people. The truth about stories is that we all have them, we all listen to them, think about them, re-tell them, in different ways, to different people, at different times. And one of the things that differentiates these stories from one another, that reveals rather than conceals, and that challenges rather than concedes is the language that we borrow.

The End. 
 
References

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Butcher, A. (2003), No Place Like Home? The Experience of East Asian International Tertiary Students in New Zealand and their Re-entry into their Countries of Origin, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Auckland: Massey University.

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