The Necker Cube – Week 4

This week, I loved the initial idea of research being a Necker Cube in the chapter. This was a very clear metaphor for me, so I think it’s an excellent starting point to think about cultural research. In the previous weeks, I always tried to think about how my personal experience about my culture could affect my questions about culture in general. So, I was very happy to see that the chapter was satisfactory in exploring this problem.

I agree that researchers should be aware of their underlying biases even when they are only asking questions or observing cultural phenomena. I think cultural research is highly valuable for any type of field to progress more inclusively. However, inclusivity is not the only outcome of it. Cultural research is important because I can see it addresses problems that are at the very beginning of research. In general, I see social scientists laying down a lot of assumptions before conducting research. Of course, you have to start with assumptions before researching a topic and there is no way of knowing a construct is definitely real. Still, I agree with the chapter that researchers should be more thoughtful of their approach even when the assumptions are very well-accepted or central to the discussion. We have always heard that “causation is not correlation”, I even have a sticker of it on my PC. However, it was still interesting for me to see that I have never really thought about sampling errors. I now understand that sampling errors do not refer to only sample size or diversity, but also the techniques of sampling in regards to them having ambiguous theories and biases of culture integrated in them.

Overall, this chapter deals with the basic problem of social sciences: causation, operationalization, sampling, and interpretation (COSI). I want to mention what I found noteworthy about them.

Causation

Culture isn’t randomly assigned as we would prefer in research so that we could manipulate it. The fact that it doesn’t mean that our inferences about it should be correlational but not causational. It was also interesting for me to think about being critical of the functionalist assumptions about culture. I agree that cultural research in general assumes that culture is a functional adaptation but there is room for cultures to be dysfunctional.

Sampling

Researchers should be careful about not overgeneralizing cultures or individuals as that would be harmful in the long run. In general, we see researchers sampling college students or specific ethnic groups, or even sampling a location-specific gender (e.g. Women in Şanlıurfa – I think that could be a specific gender identity). Those samples could be meaningful but only if the research is designed with careful consideration about the sample. I also found the sampling approaches in the chapter noteworthy because they could be a part of the solution: the typicality approach, the just minimal difference approach, the cultural experts approach (I have my questions about this), and the inversion approach.

Operationalization

One other thing that wasn’t very evident to me was the translation barrier in research. I think language is a very central thing for every culture, and working around translation could mean leaving out meaningful data and interpretations. Moreover, I believe that we should definitely be specific about our measures. However, this type of approach could turn out to impose harmful ways of thinking and viewing different cultures and individuals.

Interpretation

This is a very broad topic but in general, I seriously believe that researchers should be aware of their biases getting in the way of their conclusions.