RobertWSchrauf 2016 2FourEmpiricalMixedMe MixedMethodsInterview

2 Four Empirical, Mixed Methods
Cross-Cultural Comparisons
The use of mixed methods in cross-cultural research actually has a very long
tradition. Anthropologists, for instance, often collect both qualitative and
quantitative data during fieldwork and report both types of data in ethnographic
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texts. Methods textbooks emphasize both qualitative and quantitative

approaches to collecting and analyzing data (e.g., Bernard 2011). However,
in its contemporary form, originating in the 1980s and 1990s, mixed methods
research involves the explicit theorization of combining data types, analytic
methods, and epistemological traditions. In this sense, the combination of
qualitative methods, with their foundations in interpretivism and social con-
structionism, and quantitative methods, with their foundations in post-
positivism, has come to constitute a third paradigm. Specifically, after some
years of tension (typically chronicled as the Paradigm Wars) ( Tashakkori and
Teddlie 1998), mixed methods investigators have more or less settled into
a pragmatic approach to integrating qualitative and quantitative data that “side-
steps the contentious issues of truth and reality, accepts philosophically that
there are singular and multiple realities that are open to empirical enquiry, and
orients itself toward solving practical problems in the ‘real world’” (Feilzer
2010, p. 8; see Johnson, Onwuegbuzie, and Turner 2007). Pragmatism in this
sense derives from the American philosophical school of pragmatism, whose
major figures were Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, and which
considered thought not primarily as a means of representing reality but as a tool
for solving practical problems. (In this sense, philosophical pragmatism is
different from the subdiscipline of pragmatics in linguistics, which studies
how meaning is linked to context).
Pragmatism is not the only theory on offer for integrating data types, how-
ever, and other authors have articulated alternate integrative frameworks (see
Fries 2009; Harrits 2011; Lieberman 2005). I will explore some of these as they
apply to mixed methods cross-cultural research, and over the course of this
book I will develop the discourse-centered approach that I introduced in the
Copyright 2016. Cambridge University Press.
previous chapter. In this chapter, I review four published, mixed methods,

cross-cultural studies that exemplify four different frameworks for integrating
data (including pragmatism), and I reflect on the specific issue of how each
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24 Four Empirical, Mixed Methods Cross-Cultural Comparisons
researcher conceives the cross-cultural project. Thus, for each study, I ask two
sets of questions. First, I ask: What does this research tell us about the
assumptions, nature, and implications of cross-cultural comparison? How do
the research questions drive the selection of groups for comparison? How do
the authors structure the groups to be compared to render them comparable?
Why precisely were these communities chosen? The second set of questions
concerns the logic and theory of integrating the contributions made by quali-
tative and quantitative data and analysis. What kinds of qualitative and
quantitative data are collected? Is there a larger methodological paradigm
that frames the mutual contributions of qualitative and quantitative data?
After addressing these two sets of concerns separately for each study,
I summarize the lessons learned collectively from the four studies. Lastly,
I introduce a discourse-centered approach as an alternative and supplementary
framework for cross-cultural comparison.
Selected Studies for a Review of Current Practice

Using the Web of Science database and searching for the terms “mixed
methods” and “cross-cultural,” I found 253 hits and selected 4 studies that
met the following criteria:
1. Topic and disciplinary variety. Although the various social and behavioral
disciplines differ in the way they articulate research questions and theore-
tical foci, almost all have ventured into cross-cultural comparison.
To capture this disciplinary variety, I selected studies from the following
journals: Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology,
Cultural Sociology, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Health and
Quality of Life Outcomes.
2. Mention of a mixed methods approach in the title, abstract, or text of the
article. There have been many valuable studies that involved both qualita-
tive and quantitative data that were published prior to the mixed methods
research paradigm as we now know it. However, because I am interested in
research by authors who consciously situate their work in the mixed meth-
ods literature, I selected only articles in which the author(s) explicitly
mention doing mixed methods research.
3. Cross-cultural comparison in which comparable data were collected in two
or more groups or cultural contexts. Sometimes authors use the term “cross-
cultural” to refer to studies in which data were collected only in one society
or cultural context, analyzed and reported in the native culture of the
investigators themselves, and compared by referring to other published
data. In contrast, the studies considered here are cross-cultural in the strict
sense, in which data were collected using similar measures in two or more
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Study 1 25
cultural contexts and analyzed both within and between groups to make
principled comparisons.
4. Data collection involving human interaction. I restricted my search to
studies in which data were generated by means of human beings interacting.
This stricture excludes studies in which qualitative data were drawn from
monological texts (newspaper articles, historical documents, web pages,
transcribed political speeches, public records, epistolary collections, and the
like), where interaction between the researcher and living human partici-
pants is minimal. Similarly, this constraint excludes studies in which the
quantitative data are in the form of census, demographic, economic, trade,
governmental records, and the like, where researchers were not involved in
any interaction with participants. Although valuable and rich cross-cultural
studies have been and will be conducted by using these kinds of data, this
book focuses on the discourse that produces the data; thus, I chose social and
behavioral studies in which data were generated interactively.
For each study, I present a brief synopsis of the purposes for which it was
conducted and the places where the data were gathered. In separate sections,
I address the two sets of questions posed above, concerning the issues of
constructing contexts for comparison and the overarching analytic frameworks
within which the authors integrate the qualitative and quantitative data.
Study 1 – Psychological Anthropology –Cultures of Childhood

and Psychosocial Characteristics: Self-Esteem and Social
Comparison in Two Distinct Communities
The first study is by Andrew Guest (2007) and comes from the journal Ethos:
Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. The author studied self-
esteem among children in an inner-city housing project (Concrete Park) in
Chicago, United States, and children in four semi-rural refugee camps (Pena)
outside Luanda, Angola. Specifically, the research focused on two questions:
How do the norms, values, and practices in the local sociocultural worlds of
Concrete Park and Pena influence self-esteem among children? Do cultural
communities shift the nature of children’s social comparison? The Chicago
housing project had approximately 1,000 residents with 260 children aged
between 6 and 12 years, and the 4 Angolan camps totaled about 8,000 residents,
with perhaps 2,000 children aged between 6 and 12 years.
Constructing the Comparison: Cultural Processes in Local Contexts

Why compare housing projects in the United States with refugee camps in
Angola? On the one hand, the constructs under investigation (children’s self-
esteem, social comparison) are assumedly common, if not pancultural, and
could be investigated anywhere. Indeed, the author notes that cross-cultural

comparisons of self-esteem have been made at vastly larger scales (“North
Americans emphasize self-esteem while Asians emphasize modesty,” p. 5) and
reasonably argues that some nuance is likely necessary. To assess the effect of
local context on children’s self-esteem, he selected situations in which the
norms, values, and practices of the community were observably operative in
child–child and child–adult social interactions, susceptible to participant obser-
vation, and subject to verbalization in interviews. Importantly, these contexts
were somewhat natural in that people self-identified as members of the groups:
These communities existed as distinct social worlds, and people within the communities
regularly discussed themselves in relation to shared social identities (as being of “the
projects” and “refugiados”). Both communities also shared structural poverty relative to
their broader national contexts. As such, outside organizations often considered the
communities as “needy” and thus, regularly offered service programs to local residents.
(Guest 2007, pp. 2 and 3)
Thus, an extrinsic motive also drove the selection of participants: the author
was interested in communities identified by social organizations that “were
regularly targeted by external agencies for interventions” (Guest 2007, p. 1).
What might this approach tell us about the assumptions, nature, and impli-
cations of cross-cultural comparison? Perhaps most striking is the emphasis on
the local. The author’s methodological commitment to ethnography drives his
focus on microsocial, interpersonal interaction that necessarily takes place in
and is shaped by larger, historically conditioned national contexts (i.e., shared
structural poverty), but these latter necessarily become empirically relevant in
how they are refracted through thoroughly quotidian social relations and
interactions. This focus on the fine-grained details of local life undergirds
careful experience-near descriptions of the rationality and practices of partici-
pants, and the cross-cultural comparison then involves a close look at the
similarities and differences in the cultural processes at work in each setting.
On the basis of Guest’s research question (how do norms, values, and
practices in local sociocultural worlds such as Concrete Park and Pena influ-
ence the meaning of self-esteem for children?), cultural processes (perhaps
glossed as cultural logics; Holy 1987) are of key theoretical interest in his study.
Self-esteem is a psychological construct, and we might ask whether this
construct means the same thing across both cultural contexts. The answer is
of course “yes and no,” and this points up both the strength and weakness of
cross-cultural, comparative ethnography. Its strength lies in thick description
(Geertz 1973) – the as-near-as-possible authentic rendering of how the locals
experience and understand life, and its weakness lies in a near brush with
incommensurability – the always-partial, always-qualified, “it depends” nature
of comparison.
Study 1 27
Integrating the Qualitative and Quantitative Data: Comparative

Ethnography
The mixed methods of Guest’s study included observation of and interviews
with participants (the qualitative data) and structured surveys (the quantitative
data). For the qualitative interviews, eight adults from each site participated,
plus twelve children from Concrete Park and fourteen children from Pena.
Excerpts from and summaries of these interviews were used to illustrate
particular points throughout the article. The data for quantitative analysis
came from a ranking task with 50 adults in both field sites and a structured
survey with children (141 in Concrete Park, 239 in Pena) consisting of
a demographics section, opinion and attitude questions, and the Culture-Free
Self-Esteem Inventory for Children (CFSEI-3; Battle 2002). Both methods
were pursued simultaneously during data collection and analysis, and the
qualitative approach (participant observation and interviews, both informal
and formal) was given priority over the quantitative approach (use of the
CFSEI), resulting in a QUAL + quan design (Creswell et al. 2003; Morse
1991).
What is the logic and theory of combining qualitative and quantitative
methods in this research? There are only two explicit mentions of mixed
methods in the text of the article. First, the abstract begins, “This mixed
methods study investigated self-esteem and social comparison during middle
childhood in two distinct communities” (Guest 2007, p. 1). Second, in the
introduction, the author states: “In the body of this article I draw from mixed-
methods field research to suggest that children in both Concrete Park and Pena
regularly adapt to local norms, but those norms differ in regard to . . . ” (p. 2).
Other than these two references, he does not elaborate on his choice of methods
or on the logic of integrating these types of methods. Nevertheless, it is clear
that these semistructured and structured interviews were embedded in a larger
methodological frame of fieldwork ethnography, the basis of which is partici-
pant observation.
Ethnography is a face-to-face enterprise in which the researcher spends as
much time as necessary in the field site to maximize his or her exposure to what
Malinowski (1922 [1984]) called the “imponderabilia of actual life” (p. 20)
where the “final goal . . . is to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life,
to realize his version of the world” (p. 25). Thus, a key goal of observation in
social science is to develop in the researcher a set of intuitions that are
concordant with those of the people whom he or she studies and then to use
these intuitions to contextualize and interpret his or her observations. Clearly,
on the one hand, participant observation is necessary to understand the subtle-
ties, ellipses, and indirect inferences that occur in oral interviews (both the
myriad informal conversations of daily life and the semistructured and more
formal question–answer format of official interviews). On the other hand, it is

also arguable that direct involvement with the data collection is immensely
helpful for interpreting quantitative surveys and other structured data (see
Axinn and Pearce 2006, pp. 18–23). Although the introspection necessary for
participant observation may seem too subjective for a scientific enterprise, in
fact such introspection has an inevitable influence on the interpretation of data;
therefore, insights based on direct involvement with the cultural context in
which the data were collected are more valid than assumptions supplied from
one’s own culture.
Ethnography thus provides the overarching methodological paradigm for
this comparative study of self-esteem and social comparison in Concrete Park
and Pena. It was the researcher’s experience of ethnographic observation for six
months in Concrete Park and six months in Pena that provided him with the
necessary intuitions to interpret the mutually convergent and complementary
findings from the qualitative interviews with adults and children and the
quantitative data (rankings by the adults and the CFSEI-3 with children).
Further, the researcher integrated the qualitative and quantitative methods at
every stage, moving back and forth from qualitative method to quantitative
method during data collection and using results from one to interpret the other
during analysis, giving priority primarily to the qualitative ethnography, but
consistently relying on both as mutually illuminative.
Study 2 – Health Sciences – Cross-Cultural Evaluation

of the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale
(WEMWBS): A Mixed Methods Study
In this study by Taggart et al. (2013) from the online, open-access journal
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, the authors apply the self-report instru-
ment WEMWBS (Tennant et al. 2007) to two minority populations in Great
Britain, namely, Chinese and Pakistani immigrants living in the towns of
Birmingham and Coventry, respectively. The WEMWBS had been developed
and validated among majority populations in England, Scotland, and Northern
Ireland, and Taggart et al. tested its applicability to these minority populations.
Constructing the Comparison: Cultural Communities and Religious

Traditions
Why compare Chinese and Pakistani minorities? First, “concepts and experi-
ence of mental health and well-being may vary with culture and beliefs”
(Taggart et al. 2013, p. 2), evidence for which the authors adduce prior health-
related studies among Chinese and Pakistani groups in the United
Kingdom. Second, “both language and culture may affect responses to
Study 2 29
measurement,” and in particular, “scales developed in the UK and the USA

embody an individualistic view of life and . . . this may not apply to other
cultures” (p. 2). The authors note that limited research funding forced them to
consider just two groups, and they selected Chinese and Pakistani groups
“because their beliefs and cultural backgrounds differ both from each other
and from [those of] the prevailing white majority” (p. 2).
What might this approach tell us about the assumptions, nature, and impli-
cations of cross-cultural comparison? In contrast to the previous study, this one
focuses on ethnic groups in a multicultural society, which raises issues about
how such groups are constructed for purposes of comparison. In one sense,
from both a governmental and social science perspective, membership in an
ethnic group is by self-ascription. Thus, according to the Office for National
Statistics in the United Kingdom (2003), “Membership of any ethnic group is
something that is subjectively meaningful to the person concerned . . . And this
means that we should rather ask people which group they see themselves
belonging to” (p. 9). Similarly, in recruiting the sample for the WEMWBS
research, the authors relied on community workers who “used their links with
and knowledge of the local communities to approach adults who self-identified
as belonging to one of these two ethnic groups” (Taggart et al. 2013, p. 3).
Operationally then, ethnicity is determined by self-selection.
In the article, the Chinese and Pakistani minority groups are consistently
referred to as “communities” (forty-six times), whereas the majority is never
referred to as a community. Indeed, the term “community” does important
rhetorical work, both in this article and in the wider society of the United
Kingdom. In an ethnographic study of ethnicity in a London suburb, Baumann
(1996) noted that the term “community” has not achieved the kind of technical
status in social science as have other terms, but he also argues that it smuggles
into both popular and social scientific discourse the notion that culture and
ethnic membership are coterminous.
To make general statements about “the Asians,” “the Jews,” or “the Irish” reeks of
disrespect, ignorance, and even prejudice. Yet the same statements can be made to sound
respectful and even solidary when uttered about the Asian, Jewish, or Irish “commu-
nity.” The word is so attractive, even to the detractors of ethnic minorities, because it
appears to value people as members of a special collective. What is special about the
collective is, in the case of ethnic minorities, that they are readily presumed to share
a culture in its reified form. In this dominant discourse, “community” can function as the
conceptual bridge that connects culture with ethnos. It can lend a spurious plausibility to
the assumption that ethnic minorities must share the same culture by necessity of the
ethnic bond itself. (Baumann 1996, pp. 15 and 16)
This latter assumption is precisely the one made in this article. What makes the
Chinese and Pakistani minority groups different from the majority is their
culture, and here culture is equivalent to beliefs, principally religious value
systems. Chinese values are traced to Confucianism. Pakistani beliefs are

grounded in Islam. In this study, religious beliefs form the defining core of
Chinese and Pakistani communities.
Integrating the Qualitative and Quantitative Data: Bias

and Equivalence
The mixed methods in this study involved testing for the structural equivalence
of the WEMWBS across the samples (quantitative data) and conducting focus
groups to determine participants’ opinions about the scale and whether their
responses to specific items differed from those of the majority population
(qualitative data). All data were collected in English. That is, the survey
instruments were not translated into the native languages of the participants,
and the focus groups were conducted in English (although bilingual translators
were present). In the study, the quantitative portion (the scale) had priority over
the qualitative portion (focus groups), which resulted in a QUAN → qual
approach (Morse 1991). Indeed, the research questions differed for each phase.
methods in this research? Although the authors of this article offer no explicit
reflection on the rationale for their integration of mixed methods, their use of
both qualitative and quantitative data to develop their instruments follows the
well-established psychometric practice of using qualitative interviews either to
generate items for a quantitative instrument or survey or to collect participants’
views about such items after the survey has been administered. The goal of this
particular cross-cultural research using the WEMWBS was not to generate but
rather to validate that instrument in new populations.
In the quantitative phase, the dominant question was whether the WEMWBS
possesses similar, sound psychometric properties (particularly factor structure
and external consistency) in the Chinese and Pakistani populations as it does in
the majority populations in which it had been developed. This question is posed
and answered via standard statistical comparisons (distribution testing, internal
consistency, item total correlations, factor analysis, and correlations) with
existing instruments. The qualitative data were gathered to determine “whether
participants found the WEMWBS items easy to complete and whether they
understood them in the same way as the UK population” and “the acceptability
of the entire scale and the extent to which this covered concepts of mental well-
being relevant to each community” (Taggart et al. 2013, p. 4). These questions
were addressed in the qualitative portion of the study via content analysis.
Although not articulated by the authors, the bias-and-equivalence frame-
work of cross-cultural comparison (van de Vijver and Leung 1997, 2006)
seems to capture their logic for integrating qualitative and quantitative methods
in this study. In this framework, the authors test for the equivalence of
Study 2 31
a construct across the Chinese, Pakistani, and white cultural groups. That is,
across the minority and majority groups, the construct must be seen as relevant
or irrelevant, salient or unmarked, consequential or inconsequential in the same
ways. Essentially, the construct must have the same meaning across the cultural
groups. Further, since complex and unobservable constructs are operationa-
lized by means of simpler, observable variables or items, it is crucial that each
constitutive item have the same meaning across groups to eliminate bias.
Achieving these goals is best done by integrating qualitative and quantitative
data.
Assessing construct equivalence is the strength of qualitative research. When
the authors of the study say that focus groups were used to assess “the accept-
ability of the entire scale and the extent to which this covered concepts of
mental well-being relevant to each community” (Taggart et al. 2013, p. 4), they
were addressing construct validity. There is, however, a quantitative version of
“meaning” that involves a statistical analysis of between-group responses to the
instruments (surveys, tests, scales) used to investigate the construct to be
compared.
Canonically, there are four levels of quantitatively established construct
equivalence: functional, structural, metric, and scalar (Fontaine 2008; Van de
Vijver and Leung 2006).
• Functional equivalence stipulates that across groups, instruments should
show the same pattern of positive correlations with other related measures
and zero or negative correlations with unrelated measures. Hence, in addition
to the WEMWBS, the authors also administered the General Health
Questionnaire and the World Health Organization Well-Being
Questionnaire, and they ran correlations between these and the WEMWBS.
• Structural equivalence obtains if instruments show the same factor loadings
across cultural groups. In the Taggart et al. study, the factor structure was
different for the Chinese (one factor) compared with Pakistani factor solu-
tions (three factors), but the authors noted that these results were similar to
results from the majority populations.
• Metric equivalence requires that items show comparable loadings on the
factors.
• Scalar equivalence requires that instruments have the same origin (i.e., the
same intercept for the regression function linking the items with the latent
factors). Technically, cross-cultural comparison should be done only when
this last condition is fulfilled (Fontaine 2008). However, even a brief review
of the literature will show that most cross-cultural studies report functional
and structural equivalence but rarely report metric or full scalar equivalence.
Indeed, that is the case with the article by Taggart et al.
Bias refers to the possibility that individuals in either group respond differ-
ently to the same item because one group understands the item differently than
the other group. This is called differential item functioning, and in cross-
cultural work it often occurs when the translation is inaccurate (Allalouf,
Hambleton, and Sireci 1999). In essence, differential item functioning means
that the groups are taking different surveys because the survey items are not
functionally equivalent. Although there are statistical procedures to assess
differential item functioning (see Lai, Teresi, and Gershon 2005), they were
not used in the WEMWBS research. Rather, based on the reports from the focus
groups, we see that some minority participants understood particular items
differently than the majority population, and in each group participants men-
tioned “aspects of mental well-being not covered in the scale” (p. 10). Thus, it
seems that Chinese versus Pakistani participants had partly overlapping, but
also partly unique, ideas about what constituted mental well-being.
In sum, the bias-and-equivalence framework sets the meaning equivalence
of constructs as the precondition for comparing the responses of different
groups to instruments measuring those constructs. Further, the assessment of
construct equivalence (and relatedly, item bias) depends ideally on the com-
bined strengths of qualitative and quantitative data. In this sense, the bias-and-
equivalence framework serves as an overarching framework for the mixed
methods integration in this study.
Study 3 – Teacher Education – Motivation Beliefs of Secondary

School Teachers in Canada and Singapore: A Mixed Methods
Study
In this study by Klassen et al. (2008), published in Teaching and Teacher
Education, scholars in education at the University of Alberta (Canada) and
the Singapore National Institute of Education compared the within-country
patterning of relations between the following four variables: (1) the relation
between teachers’ beliefs about their own self-efficacy as a teacher (i.e., “How
much can you do to help students value learning?”), (2) their beliefs about their
efficacy as a collective (i.e., “How much can teachers in your school do to
produce meaningful student learning?”), (3) student socioeconomic status (i.e.,
“student family income level compared to most people in your city”), and (4)
academic climate (i.e., “Students in this school can achieve the goals that have
been set for them”).
Constructing the Comparison: Institutional Agents’ Beliefs and

Cultural Value Orientations
Why compare teachers in Alberta, Canada, with teachers in Singapore?
Although the authors suggest that the settings in Singapore and Canada are
quite different (“It is hard to think of two more divergent settings,” Klassen
Study 3 33
et al. 2008, p. 1921), they create a picture, point for point, of nearly identical
institutional situations. Both countries have majority populations within which
there exists the significant presence of minorities: in Canada, an Anglo-
European majority (81 percent) and multiple-origin ethnic populations; in
Singapore, a Chinese majority (75 percent) with Malay and Indian minority
groups. In both countries, per capita gross national income and life expectancy
are similar. Both countries have free and universal educational systems, with
similar enrollment levels and English as the language of instruction.
Educational systems in both countries take part in similar outcome measures.
The authors note, for example, that schools in both countries take part in
international assessment programs such as the Program for International
Student Assessment and Trends in International Mathematics and Science
Study (p. 1921). Finally, other than ethnicity, the demographics of the teacher
samples are also similar (in terms of gender, age range, native-born status, and
years of experience). In sum, the institutional culture of twenty-first-century
education seems much the same across the two sites, which is not surprising,
given that both countries shared a common relationship to the British
Commonwealth.
In contrast to these institutional and demographic similarities, the authors
draw attention to cultural differences between the countries. They note that,
“according to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, Canada ranks higher in indivi-
dualism than Singapore and lower on power distance” (Hofstede 1980,
p. 1921). Hofstede had collected data from IBM employees in fifty countries
between 1973 and 1979, and he argued that there were four dimensions on
which national cultures differed. Of these four dimensions, individualism
versus collectivism described the tendency to accentuate personal achievement
and individual rights over group effort and group membership, and high-power
versus low-power distance distinguished between people who find an unequal
distribution of power in social groups acceptable (high-power distance) versus
people who expect consultation and democratic process (low-power distance).
Reading Hofstede’s rankings from the 1970s and 1980s onto contemporary
Canada and Singapore, the authors differentiate them on these dimensions:
Canada is more individualist and low-power distance; Singapore is more
collectivist and high-power distance.
What does this approach tell us about the assumptions, nature, and implica-
tions of cross-cultural comparison? The variables in this study are in fact
measures of beliefs. The survey included a twelve-item measure of teacher self-
efficacy, a twelve-item measure of teacher collective efficacy, and an eight-item
scale of academic climate. Even data on socioeconomic status was reported as
a teacher belief: teachers rated the “socioeconomic status of the majority of
your students (family income-level compared to most people in your city)” on
a five-point scale (Klassen et al. 2008, p. 1923). The qualitative interviews were
content coded as articulations of teachers’ statements, opinions, and attitudes

(i.e., their beliefs).
In the quantitative and qualitative analyses, the most salient finding was that,
whereas the Canadian teachers’ perception of academic climate was driven
largely by their perception of the socioeconomic status of student populations,
the Singaporean teachers perceived the link between socioeconomic status of
students and academic climate as mediated (mitigated) by collective teacher
efficacy. The authors provide a specifically cultural explanation: “It may be that
collective motivation plays a stronger role in East Asian cultural settings,
where people may rely more heavily on group-oriented motivation beliefs,
like collective efficacy” (p. 1931).
In sum, this is a cross-cultural comparison of agents (teachers) in similar
institutions (schools) in two countries (Singapore and Canada) whose differing
professional beliefs (about self- and collective efficacy) are conditioned by
societal value orientations (individualism vs. collectivism and high-power vs.
low-power distance). At root, culture is evidenced in beliefs and value
orientations.
Integrating the Qualitative and Quantitative Data: Mixed Methods

Pragmatism
As noted above, the mixed methods in the study included a 50-item survey
instrument (3 separate scales) administered to 255 secondary school teachers in
Canada and 247 in Singapore, and qualitative interviews conducted with 10
teachers in Canada and 14 teachers in Singapore. The research design was
explicitly articulated in the language of mixed methods typologies:
“We characterize this study as a QUAN + qual design with primary emphasis
given to the quantitative data collection, analysis, and interpretation; and
secondary emphasis given to the explanatory inquiry” (p. 1922).
methods in this research? The authors note that their mixed methods
approaches “draw from the strengths of quantitative (i.e., large sample
size, prediction, and generalizability) and qualitative approaches (i.e.,
description, depth, and contextual findings) and minimize the weaknesses
inherent in monomethod paradigms” (p. 1922). The data from both meth-
ods do indeed converge on similar findings, supporting the classical notion
that mixed methods offer a means of triangulating results, and the data
from the qualitative interviews elaborate, enhance, and ultimately offer
a compelling explanation for the relations demonstrated in the quantitative
survey results. That is, the methods are complementary and together pro-
duce a fuller picture than either method alone might produce (for the
seminal article on purposes of mixed methods comparison, see Greene,
Study 4 35
Caracelli, and Graham 1989). As the authors note, the logic of integrating
these methods is captured in a “pragmatic stance that bridges research
paradigms, and is inclusive, pluralistic, and focuses on the best way to
answer research questions” (p. 1922).
A growing number of authors cite pragmatism as the appropriate philoso-
phical paradigm underlying much of the mixed methods research (e.g., Feilzer
2010; Johnson and Onwuegbuzie 2004; Maxcy 2003; Morgan 2007; Rallis and
Rossman 2003). In brief, where quantitative enquiry is understood to assume
a singular reality that is empirically available to objective, bias-free observa-
tion and where qualitative enquiry is understood to assume that there are
multiple, constructed realities available perspectivally through subjective inter-
pretation, pragmatism articulates an approach to combining both paradigms
because it is oriented toward “solving practical problems in the ‘real world’”
(Feilzer 2010, p. 8). Employing language borrowed from the early pragmatist
John Dewey, Feilzer suggests that the social world is experienced as a single
existential reality, in which “there are layers of the ‘stable and the precarious’
(Dewey 1925, p. 40), layers of ‘completeness, order, recurrences which make
possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain pos-
sibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate’ (Dewey
1925, p. 47)” (Feilzer 2010, p. 8). Although it might be tempting to assign the
usual dichotomous attributions, where “stable,” “completeness, order, recur-
rences,” and “prediction and control” belong under quantitative enquiry, and
“precarious” and “singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities” belong
under qualitative enquiry, such a reading would do injustice to the mixed
methods paradigm, which intends a single synoptic, integrative vision. That
is, working consciously within a pragmatic paradigm, mixed methods research-
ers are not simply juxtaposing the findings from different methods but rather
are deeply committed to the notion that neither approach alone is even mini-
mally adequate to the scientific tasks of describing, predicting, and explaining
the complexity of social reality.
Study 4 – Cultural Sociology – Methodological Issues in

National-Comparative Research on Cultural Tastes: The Case
of Cultural Capital in the United Kingdom and Finland
Lastly, we will examine a study by Purhonen and Wright (2013), published in
the journal Cultural Sociology, that is a methodological reflection addressing
whether Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) research in Paris between 1963 and 1968 on
the hierarchical and competitive organization of “social tastes” by class is
applicable to other times and places. Noting that contemporary studies on the
social organization of taste do not replicate Bourdieu’s innovative use of mixed
methods (multiple correspondence analysis plus archival data), Purhonen and
Wright set for themselves the task of conducting a Bourdieusian cross-cultural

analysis of social tastes in Finland and the United Kingdom.
Constructing the Comparison: Nation-States and Social Fields

Why compare Finland and the United Kingdom? In one sense, the specific
choice of national site is immaterial for testing the transferability of Bourdieu’s
theory from one social context and historical period to another. However, there
is the practical matter of having access to comparably collected data sets – an
affordance that made possible the entire exercise. Given this confluence of
factors, the selection is eminently appropriate.
What might this approach tell us about the assumptions, nature, and implica-
tions of cross-cultural comparison? In contrast to the previous studies, the groups
being compared here comprise citizens of particular nation-states. Purhonen and
Wright note that the identification of society with nation-state is potentially
problematic. Specifically, they cite Breen and Rottman (1998), Chernilo (2006),
and Wimmer and Glick-Schiller (2002), who draw attention to factors that militate
against any simple identification of society and nation, notably, the often exten-
sive, internal sociocultural variation within nation-states, the relatively recent
historical emergence of the nation-state, its shifting reconfiguration in the context
of contemporary globalization, and the ways in which social phenomena have
been shaped by these global shifts. At the very least, this critical strain in socio-
logical theory suggests that making cross-national comparisons must be more
carefully theorized, and Purhonen and Wright rise to this challenge by methodo-
logically reconstructing “national spaces” as Bourdieusian fields.
Briefly, for Bourdieu, a “field” is a social space in which interrelated agents
and institutions share fundamental interests and values and in which they
struggle to maximize their own profit and positions (Bourdieu and Wacquant
1992). The invariant structure of the field is defined by the stable social forces
that obtain between agents (occupying particular social positions) and institu-
tions within it. Bourdieu analyzed a variety of such fields, each with its own
particular structure and associated positions [e.g., academics (Bourdieu 1988)
and social tastes (Bourdieu 1984)].
The critical question for the Purhonen and Wright study is whether nation-
states are equivalent to fields. That is, does a nation-state possess the requisite
structure (i.e., stable social positions and institutions) within which we might
observe individual actors interiorizing and acting out of dispositions shaped by
that structure? As Purhonen and Wright comment:
Nations might not be the same as fields, but there is a clear relationship between the
ways in which fields, and the movements and struggles within them, are theorized, and
the methodological construction of national social spaces in [Bourdieu’s book]
Distinction and subsequent studies. One way to explore the issue of the transferability
Study 4 37
of Bourdieu’s model is through comparative analysis across national social spaces. Such
an approach also brings into stark relief the ways in which such spaces are constructed
methodologically. (p. 258)
This last comment strikes to the heart of the reflections in this chapter.
In essence, the cultures to be compared are not simply “there” in any simple
sense but must be carefully articulated and artfully bounded to facilitate mean-
ingful reflection. For Purhonen and Wright, this methodological construction is
rooted not only in the Bourdieusian theory of fields but also in the reasoning
behind multiple correspondence analysis as an analytical method. It is to that
method we now turn.
Integrating the Qualitative and Quantitative Data: Multiple

Correspondence Analysis and Reflexive Sociology
The data for this study come from two existing mixed methods data sets – one
from Finland [surveys, N = 1,388; interviews, N = 28; (Kahma and Toikka
2012; Purhonen, Gronow, and Rhakonen 2011)] and one from the United
Kingdom [surveys, N = 1,564; interviews, N = 44; (Bennett et al. 2009;
Silva, Warde, and Wright 2009)]. In their reanalysis of those data, Purhonen
and Wright analyzed the quantitative survey data via multiple correspondence
analysis and then analyzed the qualitative interview data as a means of illumi-
nating and illustrating the quantitative data, resulting in a QUAN → qual
design, with priority given to the quantitative phase of the study.
methods in this research? In this study, Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) grounds the theoretical and methodological
integration of quantitative and qualitative data. Two central, conceptual clus-
ters are interrelated in the theory. The first cluster includes system, structure,
and field, and the second includes agency, individual, habitus, and practice (for
a systematic exposition, see Swartz 1997). I have laid out the basic character-
istics of a social field above (i.e., a structured social space composed of
institutions and accepted practices in which individuals seek to maximize
their positions, influence, and profits). Such fields are therefore crisscrossed
by interacting and competing social forces. The key to the Bourdieusian frame-
work is that individuals within such social fields internalize their social and
cultural worlds as the taken-for-granted, unthematized, preconscious frame of,
and guide for, perception and action. This is the notion of habitus, the complex
of socially conditioned, internal dispositions by which people recreate their
sociocultural worlds in practices, producing a psychocultural cycle (Bourdieu
1971; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977).
In practice, Bourdieu found the combination of the statistical method of
correspondence analysis coupled with qualitative data (both interview and
archival information) especially suited to his relational approach to social life.

Unlike traditional, regression-based approaches that generally assume unidir-
ectional, linear effects – one or two social factors (independent variables)
predicting one or two social outcomes (dependent variables) – correspondence
analysis, by contrast, begins with a large contingency table that represents
multiple factors and generates a map of the complex interrelations and bidirec-
tional influences of many variables simultaneously (e.g., Bourdieu 1984, 1988;
see Greenacre 2007 for an introduction and applications). Correspondence
analysis, therefore, lends itself to mapping the social field. Qualitative data,
such as interviews, public records, and archival data, give the researcher some
insight into the on-the-ground workings of habitus – that is, how individuals
interiorize the values and practices of their social fields and selectively act on
them. In geometric data analysis (Le Roux and Rouanet 2004), a recent expan-
sion of multiple correspondence analysis, survey data are mapped to reveal the
underlying structure of a cultural field, and then qualitative interviews are
conducted with individuals who represent key positions on the map to provide
a more comprehensive interpretation of the field. This latter approach was
pursued by Purhonen and Wright.
In their study of cultural tastes, the Finnish and British maps were
strikingly similar. Two dimensions of contrast emerged from the multiple
correspondence analysis. On the one hand, there was a “hierarchy of social
positions” whereby participants with higher educational levels and occupa-
tional class were associated with greater engagement in cultural activities,
whereas those with lower educational levels and lower social class were
more disengaged. On the other hand, age was a factor, with “the higher
‘emergent-commercial’ part of the space being associated with younger age
groups and the ‘traditional-established’ part with older age groups”
(p. 264). Crossing these two contrasts (essentially, higher and lower social
position/younger – emergent commercial and older age – traditional estab-
lished) creates four broad categories or four quadrants on a correspondence
analysis map.
Because both data sets included qualitative interviews, Purhonen and Wright
could locate particular participants within each of the four quadrants in both the
British and Finnish data sets and compare these participants across nations.
The authors analyzed paired participants from the same quadrants from the
Finnish and British interviews, and they concluded that the interview data
confirmed the picture provided on the correspondence analysis maps.
“The individual cases, however, also hint at some differences between the
spaces as well. They demonstrate the variability of closer meanings and ways
of inhabiting social space than the more general patterns of dispositions and
tastes produced by [multiple correspondence analysis] alone” (Purhonen and
Wright 2013, p. 270).
Collected Reflections 39
In sum, by modeling relations across individuals at the group level, the social
scientist gains a synoptic view of a social field that is not systematically
available to participants within the field, and by close examination of indivi-
duals’ lived experience, the social scientist gains insight into how personal
worlds (and personal choices) are shaped by their precise location in the larger
social field. Researchers are themselves, of course, located within such fields,
and hence reflexivity is required in the craft of research itself. Thus, researchers
who use mixed methods have argued that reflexive sociology offers a unique
theoretical and methodological paradigm that coherently integrates both qua-
litative and quantitative data collection and analysis. Further, the Purhonen and
Wright study makes a convincing demonstration of using mixed methods
(correspondence analysis plus interviews) for cross-cultural comparison.
Collected Reflections: Constructing Contexts and Integrating

Data
These four publications represent a range of cross-cultural comparisons and
theoretical and methodological frameworks. Although they do not exhaust the
possibilities of comparison or the available integrative frameworks, I consider
them exemplars of such efforts. Furthermore, the methods and theories in the
articles are not necessarily tied to the disciplines of the researchers. Thus, for
instance, ethnography is practiced not only in anthropology but has become
common across the social sciences. Similarly, Bourdieusian theorization of
field and habitus is not limited to sociological studies but is relevant to, and
indeed further elaborated in, other social sciences. Finally, the bias-and-
equivalence framework has been most fully articulated by cross-cultural psy-
chologists, but here we see its application in health research. Such intellectual
borrowing is characteristic of cross-cultural research, perhaps because in most
social science disciplines, cross-cultural comparison generally occupies
a unique and relatively small area of enquiry, and cross-cultural researchers
evidently consider discipline-specific resources a common heritage.
Cross-Cultural Comparison: Constructing Contexts

Any cross-cultural comparison must delimit the contexts to be compared, and
these four articles exhibit striking scalar differences, not simply in size but in
kind. At one end of the continuum, there are the face-to-face, highly localized,
social spaces of housing projects (Chicago) and refugee camps (Luanda),
where the researcher focused on microsocial, interpersonal interaction. Then
there are Chinese and Pakistani ethnic groups that are embedded in, and interact
with, a racial and cultural majority population. At larger levels, there are
country-level institutions – here, secondary education – with comparable
country-level demographics, similar curricular goals, and English as the med-

ium of instruction. Finally, there are nation-states themselves, with national-
level structural regularities (institutions, stable social positions) that shape
individuals’ dispositions, perceptions, and decision making. Given this range,
it should be obvious that contexts to be compared are not bounded in any
natural, “out there in the world” sort of way. It should also be obvious that the
notion of culture carries rather different meanings and implications across these
contexts. Both contexts and cultures are in fact variably brought into focus by
the researchers. How is that done?
First, from the perspective of the social scientist, a workable comparison
rests on two conditions: first, sufficient within-group homogeneity to justify
groupness, and second, sufficient between-group variation to test the hypothe-
sized difference. Such cultural homogeneity and variance, however, must be
reasoned to, rationalized, and ultimately constructed. That is, the researcher
must set the size and context of groupness so as to ensure the necessary
homogeneity, and he or she must select groups that seem to promise the greatest
degree of difference relative to the research question.
To see this, consider some alternatives available to Guest in his comparison
of parents and children in Chicago housing projects versus Luandan refugee
camps. In that study he could have set the level of groupness at some higher
level by comparing, for instance, children in Atlanta (population just over
five million) with children in Luanda (population just over 5 million), but
given the intracultural diversity within these cities, he would likely not find
the within-group cultural homogeneity necessary to answer his questions.
On the other hand, he could have asked his question at a much lower level of
groupness by comparing (for example) Mexican American children with white
children in elementary schools in Anaheim, California, where 52 percent of the
population is Mexican American. However, among these ethnically mixed
children and parents, there might not have been sufficient between-group
variance in attitudes about childhood and childhood development to detect
the difference that he sought. Such differences might be confounded, for
instance, by socioeconomic status or neighborhood environment. The best
design then is the one that Guest selected: two groups with presumably high
degrees of within-group cultural homogeneity yet distinct enough to effectively
test his question (i.e., do group norms, beliefs, and practices affect childhood
self-esteem and practices of social comparison?). In part, then, researchers’
questions drive what counts as context and culture.
Second, although the scale of groupness is set by the researcher, it is also
the case that people themselves (participants) construct their identities and
those of others in terms of flexibly manipulated scales of groupness.
In Guest’s ethnography, the participants talk about themselves as being “of
the projects” or as “refugiados.” In the study by Taggart et al., the Pakistanis
and Chinese self-selected as Pakistani or Chinese. Certainly, in Purhonen and

Wright’s samples, the Finns would probably have spoken of themselves as
Finnish. We are generally accustomed to identifying ourselves in certain
circumstances by national citizenship, and presumably the Canadian teachers
and Singaporean teachers would have done the same. Nevertheless, it would
be no surprise if these refugiados, Pakistanis, Chinese, Finns, Canadians, and
Singaporeans also identified themselves as members of more fine-grained
cultural groups, very possibly involving tendentious relations with these larger
cultural denominations. Or, indeed, in most moments of daily life, these
individuals would make no cultural distinctions whatsoever – until the context
and their social goals in that context pushed such a distinction from back-
ground into foreground. “Groupism” is part of social discourse, whether lay or
professional, and it is quite a malleable concept, or rather, an inevitably
constructed category, dependent on both social scientific and lay contexts
and purposes.
At a more theoretical level, for both social scientists and people in general,
there is the thorny question of how culture is related to groups and individuals, and
both scientists and laypeople often equate those three terms. In practice, the
general tendency is to reify culture and to treat it as a property of groups
and individuals. For example, in talk about ethnic minorities in the
United States, both social scientists and laypeople tend to reify Hispanic or
African American culture and make assertions about “Hispanic beliefs” or
“African American values” to which (they presume) all Hispanics or all African
Americans purportedly subscribe. As Baumann notes (see above), these kinds of
equations are made palatable via linguistic sleight of hand wherein, for instance,
the word community becomes a third term between ethnic minority and culture in
a circular argument. “The two key terms mutually reinforce each other, for those
defined as ethnic minorities must form a community based on their reified culture;
and their culture must appear in reified form, because they are, after all, identified
as a community” (Baumann 1996, pp. 16 and 17). The problem is that reified
culture exists only abstractly in social science summaries and the shorthand of
common parlance.
These several considerations – that culture, cultural groups, cultural identity,
and cultural differences are necessarily social constructions adapted to circum-
stance and purpose – do not in any way deny the historically conditioned social
power of culture as a way of sorting people and explaining (or explaining away)
their behavior or their differences. Rather, from a social scientific perspective,
these considerations require that we attend in rigorous empirical fashion to
whether and how the groups that we posit do in fact operatively exist relative to
our questions and whether and how individuals within these groups profess or
exhibit the cultural characteristics, beliefs, and practices that purportedly come
with membership in these groups.
In short, we must attend empirically to cultural coherence (i.e., what con-

stitutes groupness in this context and relative to this research question) and
intracultural variability (i.e., the extent to which group members profess or
exhibit the cultural characteristics, beliefs, or practices of the group so con-
stituted). Given these determinations, we can reasonably assess whether there
are cross-cultural differences (intercultural variability) relative to our research
interest. Simultaneously, we must also attend to the fact that culture, cultural
groups, cultural identity, and cultural difference are all also discursive con-
structs and accomplishments. Hence, a complete account of cross-cultural
difference and similarity will identify, describe, and analyze the discursive
nature of cultural experience. In fact, to anticipate the next section, a discourse-
centered view of social life serves as a rich framework for understanding
culture itself.
Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Data

The studies reviewed above represent four different articulations of the logic of
integrating qualitative and quantitative data and analyses. These articulations
range from the philosophy of pragmatism, to the theory of reflexive sociology,
to the methodologies of ethnography and the bias-and-equivalence framework.
Although this initial classification of articulations – philosophical, theoretical,
methodological – might seem to tidy things up, it should also be clear from the
summaries above that each approach itself involves an intricate interweaving of
philosophy, theory, and method.
To a large extent, mixed methods theorists have adopted pragmatism as the
foundation for integrating methods (Feilzer 2010; Johnson et al. 2007;
Tashakkori and Creswell 2007), and this is the approach that we saw in the
study by Taggart et al. From a pragmatic perspective, conducting mixed
methods research presupposes an ontological commitment to a multilayered
world of objective and subjective dimensions and an epistemological commit-
ment to employing whatever methods of data and analysis are appropriate for
answering the research question at hand. This approach to truth in terms of
utility, rather than accurate representation, is a core feature of pragmatism
(Feilzer 2010, Rorty 1999). Beyond the ontological commitment and the
criterion of utility, however, pragmatism as a philosophical foundation does
not further theorize the integration of data types or methods of analysis.
In contrast, the study by Purhonen and Wright of social tastes in Finland and
the United Kingdom employs a specific social theory – reflexive sociology – to
integrate data types. This strand of sociological theory intends to resolve the
dichotomies between seemingly group-level phenomena (structure, system,
field) and individual-level phenomena (agency, habitus, practice) not by
assigning one to quantitative investigation and the other to qualitative but
rather by showing how both levels are present and operative in a thoroughly
intertwined manner in both types of data. For instance, the mapping of indivi-
duals in a quantitative analysis plays a crucial role in tying the analysis back to
specific participants (by generating the sampling frame for selecting indivi-
duals for face-to-face interviews). Then, at that individual level, the researchers
search for how societal or group-level structures and strictures are encoded in
the habitus and practices of actual participants.
Finally, there is the possibility of integrating data types within a common
methodological framework, as in Guest’s study of childhood self-esteem in
a Chicago housing project and Luandan refugee camp and Klassen et al.’s
validation of a study of well-being among Chinese and Pakistani immigrants in
the United Kingdom. As noted previously, Guest situates both his quantitative
measure of self-esteem and his face-to-face interviews in the larger context of
fieldwork ethnography. Klassen et al. work within the psychometric framework
of construct equivalence, and they use the quantitative data to test for cross-
cultural equivalence and the qualitative data to identify group-specific varia-
tions around that equivalent construct.
What is particularly curious about each of these approaches is the lack of
attention to language(s). First, there is the brute fact that the participants spoke
English, Portuguese, Finnish, Chinese, Pashtun, Urdu, Mirpuri, and other
Pakistani languages; hence, the interactions and data collection had to have
negotiated these many languages. The four articles exhibit a range of
approaches to this issue. At one end of the continuum, researchers collected
data only from individuals who spoke English. In their study of Chinese and
Pakistani ethnic groups, Taggart et al. (2013) say simply, “We undertook
quantitative surveys in purposive samples from two cities and focus group
discussions in age- (and in one ethnic group, sex-) specific groups of adults who
self-defined as English speaking” (p. 2). The authors note, however, that in
working with focus groups, local bilingual community workers and other
participants assisted individuals who were not fluent in English.
In the study of teacher self-efficacy in Canada and Singapore (Klassen et al.
2008), the researchers note that “surveys in both countries were completed in
English, which is the main language of instruction in both countries” (p. 1923).
No other mention is made of languages. In the middle of the continuum, in his
study of children in Angolan refugee camps, Guest (2007) describes working
with a field assistant who “served as my primary translator, clarifying questions
and responses during interviews to compensate for my imperfect Portuguese
language skills” (p. 10) and using back-translation for his self-esteem measure.
At the other end of the continuum, working in English and Finnish, Purhonen
and Wright are explicitly reflective about language issues, acknowledging that
the meaning of concepts and words should “have similar resonance in meaning
in all empirical settings under study. The problem of translation, however, is in
turn a more general problem of knowing what a respondent means when

answering a question” (Purhonen and Wright 2013, p. 260).
What are we to make of language differences in cross-cultural research?
There is the undeniable fact that translation plays an inevitable role at some
stage of the research, for example in instrument preparation, data collec-
tion, transcription, coding, and/or write-up. Further, although it is patently
true that translations can be made across human languages, it is also clear
that this process is always only variably successful. At basic levels, voca-
bularies seem interchangeable: rocks are rocks, and tables are tables. But
social scientists usually study more complex constructs that are unobser-
vable in any direct sense and operationalized by multiple collections of
beliefs and behaviors – constructs such as those examined here: self-esteem,
social tastes, self-efficacy, well-being. For a cross-cultural researcher, what is
lost in translation may very likely be the difference that makes a difference.
Finally, there is the uncomfortable fact that translation seems always to run
back to English. Not always, of course. There are many cross-cultural studies
conducted by and for scholars in other countries and other languages, but
there is an undeniable hegemony of English. How likely is it, after all, that the
thousands of languages and ways of life across the world and across history
are really only variants of English and American cultural experience in the
twenty-first century?
A second intriguing issue related to language is the fact that the qualitative
data in all four studies and the quantitative data in two of the studies (Guest
2007; Purhonen and Wright 2013) were generated in interactive talk.
[The quantitative data in Klassen et al. (2008) and Taggart et al. (2013) were
collected via paper-and-pencil instruments, but as we will see, even these are
treated by participants as conversations.] The details of the face-to-face inter-
actions go almost completely unremarked by the authors, and in fact the
excerpts provided in the published articles are restricted to words spoken by
the respondents alone, as if the research interviewers were ghostly recorders of
transparently meaningful verbal pronouncements. Beyond the words and their
dictionary meanings, we have no sense for how participants meant what they
said. Thus, the whole panoply of understanding a conversation partner from
another culture, transcribing and translating such conversations into written
documents, coding these documents for cultural themes, and extracting
excerpts as representative examples of cultural life – each step of which
involves yet another data transformation – is lost to view. Again, for a cross-
cultural researcher for whom the subtleties of cultural difference may be
crucial, each one of these transformations should be quite carefully scrutinized,
analyzed, and perhaps theorized.
The discourse-centered approach to data that I outline in subsequent chapters
represents another way of integrating qualitative and quantitative data that
focuses on the very nature of social science data as essentially linguistic.

In brief, all data originate in linguistic interaction, either quite literally in the
case of face-to-face interviews or derivatively in the case of paper-and-pencil
or computer-based surveys. There are subtle norms – culturally shaped linguis-
tic, discursive, and narrative practices – that guide people in making themselves
understood and in understanding others in everyday conversation and of course
in research interviews – structured surveys and open-ended interviews alike.
In essence, two types of data, one quantitative, the other qualitative, do not exist
independently. At the origin, there is only one kind of data: discursive data. But
there are differential series of data transformations and therefore different
kinds of discursive analysis.
The representation of survey data in spreadsheets takes the form of state-
ments of belief accompanied by response options, and the latter function
linguistically as stance markers, that is, they signal the stance that a person
takes toward the statement of belief. Ultimately, the responses are analyzed in
aggregate as a collective discourse about a topic, and we can ask group-level
questions about this discourse, such as, what level of agreement is there across
the group? Are there subgroups of individuals who subscribe to a different
discourse? Since discourse belongs to speakers, we can ask about the charac-
teristics of the speakers that might explain or account for different levels of
agreement or pockets of systematic difference. In short, surveys make possible
a bird’s-eye view of the sharing and distribution of discourse at the level of the
group – a synoptic view that perhaps no one speaker can ever have.
The representation of qualitative interview data in transcripts includes all the
interrupted, overlapping, half-sentence, run-on, false-start messiness of real
conversation along with annotations for prosody (volume, pitch, speed) and
possibly indications of gestural and other nonverbal signs. Attentive transcrip-
tion of these details facilitates fine-grained analyses of how people co-construct
their worlds in actual conversation, how they reason and problem-solve as
a social process, and how they build up and negotiate their cultural identities as
resources in talk. What is essential to understand in this negotiation is that the
data come not from individuals but from dyads (at the lowest level) or perhaps
small groups at the face-to-face, time-bound level of interactive conversation.
Consequently, the integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches is
not about integrating group-level and individual-level data (as in the articles
examined above). Rather, it is about integrating data on various levels of
interactive discourse, itself always social and rarely ever individual. This
thoroughly social approach represents a different ontological foundation for
the object of social science – interactive events rather than individual minds or
aggregate groups. In turn, this way of conceiving the object of investigation
requires appropriate analytic methodologies, namely, discourse and conversa-
tion analysis. Thus, a discourse-centered integration of qualitative and
quantitative data presents an alternative interweaving of theory and method,

different from but applicable to the frameworks presented in the four studies
discussed in this chapter. The goal of this book is to delineate a way to trace
one’s data back to the discursive occurrences and to reconceive data analysis as
forms of the analysis of discourse at group and dyadic levels of interaction.
However, to do that, we must first take on board some linguistic theory.

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2 Four Empirical, Mixed Methods

texts. Methods textbooks emphasize both qualitative and quantitative

previous chapter. In this chapter, I review four published, mixed methods,

Selected Studies for a Review of Current Practice

Study 1 – Psychological Anthropology –Cultures of Childhood

Constructing the Comparison: Cultural Processes in Local Contexts

could be investigated anywhere. Indeed, the author notes that cross-cultural

Integrating the Qualitative and Quantitative Data: Comparative

formal question–answer format of ofﬁcial interviews). On the other hand, it is

Study 2 – Health Sciences – Cross-Cultural Evaluation

Constructing the Comparison: Cultural Communities and Religious

measurement,” and in particular, “scales developed in the UK and the USA

systems. Chinese values are traced to Confucianism. Pakistani beliefs are

Integrating the Qualitative and Quantitative Data: Bias

Study 3 – Teacher Education – Motivation Beliefs of Secondary

Constructing the Comparison: Institutional Agents’ Beliefs and

content coded as articulations of teachers’ statements, opinions, and attitudes

Integrating the Qualitative and Quantitative Data: Mixed Methods

Study 4 – Cultural Sociology – Methodological Issues in

Wright set for themselves the task of conducting a Bourdieusian cross-cultural

Constructing the Comparison: Nation-States and Social Fields

Integrating the Qualitative and Quantitative Data: Multiple

archival information) especially suited to his relational approach to social life.

Collected Reﬂections: Constructing Contexts and Integrating

Cross-Cultural Comparison: Constructing Contexts

country-level demographics, similar curricular goals, and English as the med-

and Chinese self-selected as Pakistani or Chinese. Certainly, in Purhonen and

In short, we must attend empirically to cultural coherence (i.e., what con-

Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Data

turn a more general problem of knowing what a respondent means when

focuses on the very nature of social science data as essentially linguistic.

quantitative data presents an alternative interweaving of theory and method,

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