Question: Will any of you spread your research to other countries to increase population validity and see how culture affects the results of your research, or will it be purely based in the UK?
Yes, I really hope to conduct some research in other countries (if I get the money to do it!). There has been a really cool study recently published which studied 10,000 teenagers from 16+ countries!
It’s always worthwhile replicating research in different cultures. My work on transport will be based in the UK, and the underlying theory of social identity has been challenged because of the lack of studies in different cultures, so I’d hope that yes it could be replicated.
While my research at the moment is concentrated on the UK – because it deals with how we fund mental health in the NHS – I would hope that just as I am influenced by others across the world, I might be able to support people in other countries too.
It’s a good point to suggest that increasing population size captured in research can increase its validity, and that it can be important to check that concepts hold across countries rather than in just one place like the UK. Culture can have a massive impact on research findings – particularly in psychology. Sometimes, the research you’re doing might be explicitly interested in one or only a few specifc cultures – and as long as you’re not making unmerited assumptions that things are the same all over the world, that’s ok (even if it’s waaaaay smaller in scope).
We’ve recently done some research looking at how people access and use online support groups and we gathered data from Ireland, the USA and Australia in addition to the UK. We found some really interested cultural effects that tell us a lot about the different healthcare systems in each of those countries, e.g. US people are often more reliant on online support because they don’t have a free health service like we do. It’s always interesting to incorporate cultural as a factor in your research where this is relevant because we can be profoundly affected by our upbringing and the cultural norms of the society we live in, unfortunately it’s not always feasible because it’s usually more expensive and time consuming
My current research is based on the UK. I examine ‘cold’ sales calls initiated by salespeople working for British companies. I would definitely be interested in collecting cold calls in a different country, but at the moment that is really difficult. Also, it would have to be in a country whose language that I can speak well in order for me to be able to analyse the conversations.
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