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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 4TH OCTOBER, 2015
I’m a CARICOM national
, with Jamaican and French
dual nationality. It can be surprising what it means to be
Jamaican. Obviously, the meaning of being a Jamaican is
quite different for different people, particularly for younger
and older Jamaicans who are in a good position to own
the ‘truth’ about being Jamaican. There is a vast gender
and generational gap between the Jamaican-ness of young
Jamaican men and the Jamaican-ness of older Jamaican
women – with considerable influence from family in the US.
But I’m talking about cultural identity in terms of behaviours
that communicate personal values, attitudes, beliefs and
intentions, VABI. What the American philosophers call the
Intentional Stance.Whereas youmight be referring to ethnic
look and, of course, as they say, looks can be deceptive. In
cultural identity research, looks can even be misleading.
I have been fortunate to have lived and researched
with the peoples of five continents. I have experienced the
dire poverty of diasporic Indian cane farmers in the South
Pacific. I have experienced the enormous wealth of European
aristocracies. I have always tried to speak their languages,
to understand what it means to be them and through these
shared experiences to understand my own changing self –
mine is perhaps the classic Socratic ‘examined life.’ Most
importantly for me is the freedom to be who I want to be.
So my me-search not only aims to measure and describe
cultural identities, but helps to empower by enabling others
to retain or to change their cultural identities so as to fulfil
their own potential for self-actualisation.
When institutions fund ‘evidence-based research’
we must ask whose evidence the research is based on –
researcher-chosen evidence or respondent-chosen evidence
–who selects the facts, who determines the ‘correct’ meaning
of the questions, who says which responses are valid and
which are not.
For a simple, everyday example we could take those
ubiquitous ‘satisfaction questions’ we are asked to answer.
When I go withmy family to one of our favourite restaurants
in Trincity, we are often asked to fill in one of their
questionnaires. If you Google ‘restaurant questionnaire’ you
will get 14million of them. Typically you are asked to ‘Please
indicate your level of agreement or disagreement with the
following statements’ by ticking one of 4 or 5 boxes that
range from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree.’
Typically, restaurants want to know if their dishes are
‘tasty and delicious’ so they ask if we agree with “The dishes
are tasty and delicious.” Obviously, we keep going back
because we ‘strongly agree’ that the dishes are tasty and
delicious, mostly, thoughmy husband prefers different ones
to those I choose. He thinks my dishes are not so tasty as the
ones he chooses – but that is to do with personal preference
and they are not asking about that. What most mothers
RESEARCH
CULTUROMETRICS
Measuring cultural identity
We know good social policy is based on good
social research. But did you know that good social
research is not often based on good information?
The research process itself is set up to favour
what researchers want and believe. Thus resulting
research-based policies mainly favour the interests
of the researchers and their institutional funders
rather than benefiting the people and societies to
whom the policies apply. These are the claims of
UWI researcher and Professor of Language and
Culture,
Dr. Beatrice Boufoy-Bastick
. Here is an
excerpt from her explanation of how it works. The
full text is available online at
/
uwiToday/default.asp
would notice is that if their children are very hungry they
like everything about the restaurant. But if they have been
‘snacking’ then they rate everything with less enthusiasm.
So the answers to their questions are mixed up by the
needs and expectations of the respondents and have very
little to do with the quality of the food and service and all
the other things restaurants choose to ask about. That’s
traditional research. Take the World Health Organisation’s
classic question “How healthy are you? Excellent, Good,
Fair, or Poor.” In some countries, responses to this survey
question correlate negatively with objective measures of
health status.
This is mainly because healthy people have a higher
expectation for their health – the smallest deviation from
their expected optimal levels is reported as dissatisfaction
with the level of their health. Those who are used to poor
health, report their usual poor health as average and any
unexpected slight improvement as being in good health. In
addition, we have the current ‘happiness effect.’ Many social
survey questions are actually measuring State Satisfaction
(current personal satisfaction levels) and these depend on
current Expectation rather than being a measure of what
the question asked.
Compounding the untruths is that the questions
themselves – that is their factual content – are chosen by
the researcher as representing the respondents’ problem.
The respondents themselves, if they had the choice, might
have chosen other questions as being more important to
their problem – and simply, the actual questions and the
levels of response might have different meanings to the
respondents than they do to the researcher. These problems
are far from unknown in traditional research. They are
referred to as Cultural Relativism or inter-subjectivity and
are ‘swept under the carpet’ by assuming that individual
cultural and subjective choices are ‘statistical errors’ that
can be eliminated by asking large numbers of respondents
and averaging out their differences and assuming that the
average result is the ‘true’ response for each person.
