Cross-Cultural Research Strategies for Social Work Research: Designs, Measurements, and Interpretation

BACKGROUND: Cross-cultural research is more important now than ever for social work researchers, because anticipated changes to policies that threaten equal opportunities, equity and justice will impact the most marginalized populations. In order to advance evidence-based policy, cross-cultural research must generate knowledge from studies with robust internal and external validity, which can then be generalizable and meaningful across cultures. In order to achieve this goal, rigorous steps must be taken during each stage of a study's development, implementation, and interpretation of results, in order to strengthen the scientific evidence for advancing social justice.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this workshop is to familiarize participants with methods and strategies that can maximize causal inferences and generalizability of research findings across cultures, including race, ethnicity, gender, languages, religions, immigration status, national origins and other cultural identities.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Workshop participants will learn about the ways in which a study can be designed to establish research-design equivalence among diverse groups. Research-design equivalence “refers to the use of processes and procedures that ensure accurate representation of the phenomenon under investigation across diverse groups” (Farmer, A.Y. & Farmer, G. L., 2014, p. 1). Measurement equivalence, in particular, is critical to the research process, because “one cannot draw meaningful comparisons of behavioral problems, social values, or psychological status between and across cultural groups in the absence of cross-culturally equivalent research instruments” (Tran, Nguyen, & Chan, 2017, p.1). Participants will learn about what constitutes research design equivalence when study participants come from diverse groups. The establishment of equivalence during the problem formulation, research design, sampling, measurement selection, data collection, data analysis, and reporting of results phases will be addressed. Workshop participants will learn about the major threats to equivalency that occur during each phase of the research process.

Participants will learn: 1. Strategies to recruit and maintain participation of diverse research populations.

2. Procedures for structuring data collection to ensure equivalence across diverse groups.

3. The use of Structural Equation Modeling and Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis during the problem formulation phase of study to establish construct equivalence across diverse groups.

4. The use of Latent Class Analysis to identify unobserved participant diversity that might threaten the study's internal and external validity.

Instructional Strategies: Participants will engage in hands-on practice with cross-cultural research designs from conceptualization of research concepts, development of research aims, construction of research measurement, data collection, data analysis and interpretation. We will also demonstrate the application of multiple group confirmatory factor analysis to establish measurement equivalency and the use of Latent Class Analysis to identify within-group diversity. Illustrations from case studies and published works will be presented, through examples from population-based data (i.e., Add Health, National Educational Longitudinal Study, Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey, American Community Survey).