Methodological limitations

Some key methodological issues and limitations of cross-cultural research will now be addressed.

Equating nation with culture

The idea that cultures cluster within national boundaries is one of the most cited methodological limitations of cross-cultural research - that is, it relies on the ontological assumption that countries can be seen as units. Hofstede published a paper defending the need to equate nations with cultures in the following way: ‘Nations are not the best units for studying cultures ... True, but they are usually the only kind of units available for comparison and better than nothing’

(Hofstede, 2002). Other scholars, like Sivakumar and Nakata (2001), have defended the use of countries as an imperfect proxy for culture more in depth, reviewing both conceptual and empirical research which highlighted both within-country commonalities and

between-country differences in values. The methodological and theoretical significance of within-culture variation was also discussed by Au (1999) warning that average levels of conformity in each culture cannot reveal cross-cultural difference in variance, and what is needed is the standard deviations of measures between each of

the case studies. Mesoudi (2011), a cultural evolutionary theorist defends the use of basic units of measurement and their

representations of reality as a means to begin to understand complex processes. For this study the standard deviations of measures were thus included in all the questionnaire responses, along with an in-depth look at the intracultural versus intercultural differences.

Culture is stable and heterogenous

Many studies, including the meta-analytic review of research using Hofstede’s framework (Taras, Kirkman, Steel, 2010) have expressed a need for a moratorium on Hofstede’s country scores due to their age (the dataset is from the 1960s and early 1970s). But Sondergaard (1994) found that researchers are just as likely to use Hofstede’s dimensions to create their own conceptual framework to classify and explain the influence of culture, rather than use

Hofstede’s country scores directly. Hofstede himself defended the use of the country scores by saying that the dimensions have ‘centuries-old roots’ and are still valid (Hofstede, 2002). This is then less a problem of old data, and more a question of confidence in the stability of culture.

Different camps within globalization theory highlight these tensions: whilst hyper-globalists argue that there is now a ‘world culture’ gradually eroding systemic differences between countries, ‘glocalists’, on the other hand, emphasise the difference between ‘policy rhetorics’ converging, and practices on the ground converging (Mostafa and Green, 2013). Regardless, all cross-national studies suffer from the influence of international agencies which violates the independence criterion when using countries as independent units of analysis (Gerring, 2012).

Culture can be captured quantitatively by self-report questionnaires and their mean scores

Can surveys ‘capture’ culture? Many scholars think not (McSweeney, 2002; Baskerville, 2003; Taras & Steel, 2009).

Hofstede agrees as well, but to a certain extent, saying that surveys should not be the only way that culture is analysed (Hofstede, 2011). Differentiating attitudes by mean responses can also be inherently problematic. As Camparo (2013) argues, ‘Each subject’s set of

responses generates a probability distribution on the ordinal scale, so that by concentrating solely on the subject’s mean response

researchers only differentiate among subjects based on the lowest non-trivial moment of this probability distribution’ (29). Mixed-method approaches with quantitative (etic) and qualitative (emic) data are needed to better understand what this means for each individual group, and the present research used a mixed-method approach for this reason.

Cultural dimensions have a predictive power to results separate from social, political and/or economic measures

Baskerville’s (2003) paper, ‘ Hofstede never studied culture ’ argued that differences in culture are socioeconomic in origin. Taras, Kirkman and Steel’s (2010) meta-analytic review, however, found that in regards to emotion and attitudes, the predictive power of culture was higher than that of other demographic variables. Regardless, the present study will take into account social, political and economic measures of each case study country, and the demographics of each of the individual respondents. Studies have also been devoted to how culture impacts personality traits (and vice v ersa, see: Hofstede & McCrae, 2004), but this is beyond the remit of the current study.

2.5. Conclusion

This brief literature setup served to contextualise the findings of the quantitative and qualitative phases with a comparative design that will follow over the next two chapters: what the research

questions were, the definitions of the keyword, the most relevant literature, the conceptual framework used, and the methodology employed. Informed by a transformative paradigm, a sequential QUAN-QUAL analysis with a comparative design was chosen (an online 38-question questionnaire, followed by 45-minute

semi-structured interviews with teachers from four different countries) in order to answer two questions:

1. How do teachers perceive and practice social and emotional education in different cultures?

2. How are government policies and/or programmes about social and emotional education (if any exist)

implemented?

The most pertinent gaps in the literature were identified as the teacher’s self-perceived role as an emotion socialiser and facilitator of SEE; the different emotional ecologies of the classroom

cross-culturally (whether emotion is inhibited or expressed); how emotion is valued in the learning process; and what emotional and social skills make up SEE provision on the ground (rather than what is recommended by policy).