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Issues in Conducting International Collaborative Research
Once investigators have completed the preliminary tasks of assembling the collaborative team and organizing the project, they may face an array of varied and often vexing challenges once the research gets under way, some of which resemble or overlap with those overcome in the project’s earlier stages. Based on their experiences working on a variety of international collaborations, speakers and other participants highlighted some of these major issues, as well as approaches they found useful in dealing with them. Discussion during the workshop centered primarily on the importance of cultivating personal relationships among collaborators, especially in light of the inevitable difficulty of bridging cultural differences that separate them; the need to deal flexibly with unexpected circumstances and changes while carrying out data collection and analysis; using new technologies in both rich and less wealthy countries; and writing up and disseminating results.
CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIPS
Although all agreed that international collaborations generally grow out of personal relationships, workshop participants also emphasized that working harmoniously with colleagues from differing cultural and intellectual backgrounds means overcoming many opportunities for misunderstanding, miscommunication, and even conflict. National and cultural differences will almost inevitably arise during any large project, many participants concurred. Fostering good relations among team members therefore needs to be an important and continuing concern.
Perhaps the most successful strategy for maintaining and improving the ties among team members, workshop participants agreed, is holding regular face-to-face meetings. Although e-mail, Skype, and other forms of communication are helpful, nothing captures the nuances of communication or nourishes personal relationships as effectively as regularly spending time together. No matter how exhaustive and harmonious initial discussions proved to be, researchers working collaboratively should not think everything has been said at the beginning, said workshop planning committee cochair Judith Torney-Purta in reflecting on Joseph Tobin’s written statement. Indeed, speakers and participants repeatedly
stated that regular opportunities for collaborators to meet in person should be built into the collaboration plan.
During the five-nation Children Crossing Borders Project in which Tobin participated, for example, the 20 collaborating researchers from England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States met for a week twice each year to plan next steps, develop coding schemes, analyze data, and write reports and publications, Tobin reported in his written comments. Such discussions are not always harmonious, however, as cultural differences asserted themselves. “At our worst moments,” Tobin continued, “we performed versions of national character stereotypes, with the Germans insisting on following the agenda and complaining that the Italians were engaging in side conversations or going off topic, while the French were resisting overlinear thinking and waxing philosophical. The Americans presumed to run everything in spite of having an insufficiently nuanced understanding of various national contexts.” One solution to this was for each country to take a turn at chairing the meeting.
Reporting on a different project, Jennifer Lansford noted that regular in-person, meetings over a period of years allowed collaborators to become friends. As such, they trusted each other and felt more free to share ideas. Lansford described how this group tries to keep power relationships in balance by rotating their in-person meetings among the various participating countries, having met only once in the United States. The local collaborator in the host country takes a leadership role in the meeting, is in charge of the local arrangements, and acts as cultural guide. These meetings also purposely include tourist visits to local places of interest and social programs rooted in the local culture. All these shared experiences help build the personal relationships and understanding so useful to the collaboration’s success. In an effort to broaden the range of the collaborators’ relationships, students who have worked at the local research site also attend some events, and local scholars not affiliated with the project are invited to a one-day conference about the project.
As another way of building local relationships, Laura Johnson, associate professor of psychology at the University of Mississippi, supported the value of researchers bringing their families into the field. Her experience in Africa showed that a more trusting relationship can be built when family members accompany a researcher; the relationship is more than between the researcher and local colleagues and research populations, giving rise to a stronger feeling of good will.
Stressing the importance of trust, Johnson advised researchers to build it by giving back to the local communities and institutions involved in the research and by being helpful in ways other than just collaborating on the project. For researchers in the field, local colleagues can serve as immensely valuable cultural brokers, as when on one occasion she made a significant mistake in local etiquette. The local colleague corrected her error and apologized for her behavior, successfully repairing the situation.
Language may also be an issue among collaborators, Tobin warned. Although English is now widely recognized as the language of science and often serves as lingua franca for international collaborations, this linguistic dominance can put even fluent nonnative English speakers at a significant disadvantage. It can be difficult for them to understand the nuances of the discussion or to persuasively make their case, both in oral exchanges and in written reports. Although it is often easier for the U.S. team members to take the role of lead author, this may not be fair to the non-U.S. team members, and can lead to a perception of the U.S. team dominating the reports and papers.
THE NEED FOR FLEXIBILITY
Crucial to success, Tobin also observed, is willingness to balance the commitments collaborators have made to data collection methods with an acknowledgement of each partner’s domestic constraints and pressures. Teams might sometimes depart from the agreed-upon plan. From his experience, although some members of the larger group might see this as a failure to meet commitments, the team making changes was provided the opportunity to explain the constraints they were working under, which often proved persuasive.
Johnson, like Michele Gelfand, also emphasized during her presentation the importance of “triangulation,” or validation against other methods, in choosing and using research data and methods. She also described an alternative research approach that she learned in the field, a technique called Camera Voice developed by Caroline Wang, an anthropologist in China. People are taught to use cameras and asked to take pictures of things they consider significant in order to express their opinions. This opportunity bridges languages and cultures, giving people voice as they select what to photograph and then explain their choices.
Overall, Johnson recommends an “attitude of adventure,” which requires letting go of control and learning to adapt on the fly. At one point, for example, she wanted to narrow her sample to persons of certain ages, but then she discovered that where she was working individuals did not always know their age. This made the defined sample she had planned impossible to achieve. On another occasion, she was expecting to do a focus group of 10, but the entire community wanted to meet with her that day, so she went ahead with the larger group. Johnson warned potential collaborators to not focus on outcomes, since some things will remain unresolved. For her, the research experience is “really about the climb.”
USING NEW TECHNOLOGIES
The electronic technologies that have become widespread in recent years present both opportunities and challenges for international collaborations, and are often opposite sides of the same coin, said Barbara Tversky, professor
emerita of psychology at Stanford University. Opportunities include very efficient and effective new means of organizing and managing both collaborations and data, such as video conferencing for planning and discussing research and cloud computing for sharing and analyzing data and working collaboratively on writing proposals, reports, and papers.
Data collection possibilities are numerous, she said, offering examples such as Mechanical Turk, a website that can recruit participants worldwide, and the wide variety of MOOCs (massive open online courses), games, and other platforms that allow interaction among large populations across the world. Other crowdsourcing methods can also recruit large numbers of people to work on scientific problems or provide information. Foldit, for example, has enlisted people to work on solving problems in protein folding. Data mining allows investigators to search databases, Facebook, and Twitter. It allows one to see what terms people in different countries are looking for on the web as a response to international events or personal events, Tversky said.
The huge datasets available today also allow for numerous unintended uses that can suggest new hypotheses and unsuspected connections among phenomena, she went on. New tools offer “incredibly clever ways of doing research, not our usual bag of tricks, but searching Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and again, you have millions of data points all over the world.”
The challenges these technologies present are also legion, she continued. One is the danger that technology will drive the research, encouraging investigators to choose methods or measures simply because they are feasible and available. Very large existing datasets also permit investigators to do research on international subjects without actually needing to travel or relate directly to people in other countries. With large datasets and crowd-sourced information, furthermore, the cultural relevance of the research categories and the representativeness of the sample may be impossible to ascertain.
Privacy is another major concern. Online data generally lacks institutional review board protection, and laws, regulations, and standards regarding use of online data differ among countries, adding to the difficulty of protecting privacy, Tversky said. She also alluded to research showing that 87 percent of the U.S. population can be uniquely identified using three pieces of data: birth date, zip code, and gender.
DISSEMINATING RESEARCH RESULTS
Once data collection and analysis is complete, disseminating a research project’s results constitutes a crucial final step. Within the academic world, publication in peer-reviewed journals is generally considered to fulfill this role. But, as Sonia Suchday noted, and as several other participants agreed, many types of collaborative international research call for sharing findings with a
broader public, including the communities where the research took place, policy makers, practitioners, and even the general public.
Dissemination efforts must be appropriate to the intended audience and to the cultural context, Suchday continued, and in many cases these efforts also involve cultural translations. Researchers sometimes forget that even the medium of writing may not carry the same weight in different cultural contexts. In some cultures, written documents are formalities not generally used for communication.
To disseminate results and findings in such contexts, therefore, researchers must work to devise other, appropriate means of conveying information, be they face-to-face or community meetings or other types of materials. Johnson noted, however, that such efforts are costly in time and energy, and though they are often very valuable, they rarely get recognition or credit in the academic world. In fact, they may be viewed as distracting from the “real” goal—and certainly the one more conducive to career advancement—of disseminating results to the scientific world.
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