Methodological issues in cultural and cross-cultural research

Acquirement of knowledge about human beings, their psychological functioning, is not an ideological neutral process. Research process is a cultural product, and each of its stage reflects ideas, values, behavior rules specific for the given culture. Quite often, psychologists assume, rather too optimistically, that their expertise in main-stream methodology is sufficient to conduct interesting and valid research in cultural and cross-cultural psychology. The purpose of this paper is to make researchers sensitive to specific problems that appear in studying individuals in cultural contexts, and to provide an overview of issues that can influence the process of developing research project, collecting and interpreting data. In the first part of the paper the taxonomy of methods and of the most popular research paradigms was presented, while the second part focused on problems of equivalence and of methodological biases in cross-cultural domains. peerReviewed publishedVersion