Ethical Issues in Cross-Cultural Research

The Investigator-Participant Relationship

Codes of ethical conduct typically place great stress on relationships between researchers and participants.

These relationships are very different in biomedical studies, psychological experiments, survey research, and cross-cultural observational studies. These differences make codes based on those developed for biomedical research contexts especially problematic when applied to cross-cultural observational research. Some of the key differences between the two contexts are summarized in Table 1. As the table makes clear, the presumed distance between researchers and participants is often much less in cross-cultural observational studies than it is in biomedical contexts. As a result, these cross-cultural researchers must often wrestle with concerns about the ways in which their living arrangements may affect the people they study, while their familiarity with the group under study and its language surely affects the quality and success of their research. Fieldworkers have unique relationships with the people they study because they are often dependent on the studied population for shelter, food, informants, and translation.

Power and Status

The perceived power of cross-cultural researchers varies according to the research methodology and the history of researchers in the area. These researchers may be perceived as powerful because they are economically privileged relative to the local population, but they are weak in other respects because they may be perceived as “naive” or “childlike” with respect to their ability to communicate or understand local customs. Biomedical researchers, in contrast, typically appear to have considerable power over procedures and even the health of participants. In biomedical research, participants enter contexts (e.g., clinics, hospitals) in which researchers are perceived as experts.

Cross-cultural researchers are usually foreigners to the communities they study and in which they live while conducting fieldwork. Because fieldworkers are typically more affluent than the people they study, they are often treated as scarce resources, so that their decisions (such as where to live) may create jealousy. Western fieldworkers may also elicit unwelcome comparisons with Western colonialists of the past, and this can influence the willingness of people to participate in the research. It is thus extremely important for researchers to respect local customs, speak the local language, and live like the participants. In fact, it is often necessary for cross-cultural researchers to learn about the local language and beliefs before they begin to conduct their research.

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