Abstract
This article tells the story of the journey made by an international research group of social psychologists in their collaborative projects carried out over a number of years after the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989. The article explores some relations between the aims of research conducted during a period of rapid political, social and economic change in Central and Eastern Europe, and the ways these studies were shaped and transformed through collaboration. It shows how the collaboration of researchers in the team affected the development of theoretical concepts and methodological ideas over the years, as well as how the team learned from mistakes. Collaborative efforts cannot be viewed separately from the content of research. Moreover, this international collaborative research has shown that the relationships between institutional and cultural changes cannot be understood by means of comparing phenomena across different countries but by case studies in individual countries.
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Notes
One of the most famous of cross-national studies is Schachter’s et al. (1954) seven countries project on threat and rejection. The experiment was designed in the United States and was simultaneously conduced in Holland, Sweden, France, Norway, Belgium, Germany and England. This extensive study was carried out with a number of collaborators under the auspices of the Organisation for Comparative Social Research. The aims of the Organisation were to encourage co-operation among social scientists of different countries. Subsequently, much cross-national and cross-cultural research has used the same pattern: the study is designed in one country, translated into other languages, the data are collected in respective countries or nations and comparative analyses, usually statistical, are performed. Researchers often take care that the translation of the material is correct by translating it back into the original language.
It is an interesting phenomenon for a future historian of social psychology to find out why social psychology as a discipline has kept avoiding the study of language and communication (Moscovici and Marková 2006).
The respondents were first presented with 35 political, ideological and economic terms in order to evoke associations. Each term was presented on a separate page in a booklet and respondents were instructed to write down, as quickly as possible, the first word which came into their minds when reading each of the terms. The rating scale task contained the same terms as the word association task (excluding the term ‘democracy’). Respondents were asked to rate on a four point scale the extent to which each of the terms would help explain what democracy meant to them. A score of zero indicated ‘does not help to explain’ while a score of three indicated ‘would help a great deal’.
In his studies of empirical semantics Arne Naess (1953) preoccupied himself with the idea of the preciseness of meaning. In a simplified way we can interpret him as saying that two speakers may use the same term but differ with respect to the meaning they attach to it; or in contrast, they may use different terms but share their underlying meanings. For example, the speakers may both agree with the claim that ‘Democracy is freedom’. However, through elaboration of the term ‘freedom’ in a discussion they may discover their underlying disagreement. For one ‘freedom’ could mean ‘freedom to publicly show signs of one’s religion’ while for the other freedom might mean ‘separation of religious signs from public life’ thus discovering that their positions are incommensurable. In other words, from the original agreement they arrive at a disagreement. In contrast, speakers could start from apparently diverse positions. For one ‘democracy means freedom’ while for the other ‘democracy means equal opportunities’. In discussing their disagreement they could arrive at underlying agreement: equal opportunities actually mean freedom for all.
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Marková, I., Plichtová, J. East–West European Project: Transforming and Shaping Research Through Collaboration. Integr. psych. behav. 41, 124–138 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-007-9014-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-007-9014-y