Symposium Description:
Scholar and the general public alike have long perceived the need to understand more of global issues that have varying impact on the well being of modern societies. Such needs entail more of the cross-cultural research study of human behavior and society to seek answers to questions about those problems across a wide domain. In addition to the demand for the comparative research in response to the issues human beings are now facing, aspects of this scientific method focusing on systematic comparisons themselves such as its process, concepts, features, problems encountered, and ethical issues also need to be examined and re-examined, especially when the advent of information technology helps make online data collection methods possible.
As a result of the growing concern to understand the worldwide problem as well as the cultural diversity and to sharpen the research method itself, the past decades have witnessed quite a few cross-cultural research studies of and on varying scales and topics, despite the involving relatively high cost and the great amount of time taken. Among the past and current known works, one exemplary project on citizenship education for the 21st century commenced in 1991, involving four research teams, nine nations, and twenty-six researchers and using EDFR as the core research methodology. Such a comparative research study and any other cross-cultural comparison efforts often result in written reports or textbook as their concrete evidence. What remain not so evident are impacts of those studies on local or national agenda as well as the valuable research experience and knowledge gained from the studies themselves that could be further shared with researchers’ peers.
Considering the above needs and interests, the symposium on Conducting Cross-Cultural, Cross-National Research in International Settings was then organized to provide an opportunity for cross-cultural researchers to share their works together with their impacts and for any other conference participants, both students and scholars, to learn from them through keynote addresses, panel discussions, paper presentations.