On the morning of January 11, the lecture “Consideration for Best Practice in Cross-Cultural Surveys” successfully held online. The lecture was one of the International Communication Research Methods Workshop Series organized by the Greater Bay Area International Communication Research Institute, South China University of Technology. Sung K. Cho, Honorary Professor of Chungnam University and founding President of the Asian Association for Public Opinion Research (ANPOR), was invited to deliver the lecture. And Luo Yunjuan, professor of the School of Journalism and Communication of South China University of Technology and vice president of the Institute of International Communication of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, hosted the lecture.
During the lecture, Professor Sung K. Cho provided the attending teachers and students on how to resolve issues that arise frequently in transnational research. He started out by making it clear that the goal of transnational research is to compare particular phenomena in two or more nations. Then, he mentioned the primary difficulties that transnational research may encounter: first, data quality, including key term definitions, the language collected through the data, translation issues, sample matching challenges, time of data collection, and comparability of research instruments; second, country selection, comparable or dissimilar; third, the interpretation of research results.
Professor Sung K. Cho gave a vivid introduction to how the aforementioned difficulties might be effectively addressed, drawing on his own research experience as well as pertinent academic papers. He pointed out that respondents may give different answers to the same question when multiple survey methods are used, and that it may be challenging to compare research findings when different survey methods are used in different countries due to variations in country’s basic condition or state. Moreover, surveys may also be challenging due to variations in language, culture, and education. Therefore, researchers must think holistically before weighing judgment.
In the end, Professor Sung K. Cho expounded strategies on how to better conduct transnational investigations. First and foremost, the following points must be made clear: the purpose, which should be understood by the whole team members; the target people, and focus on it; the research question, descriptive, theoretical, or exploratory. The second step is survey implementation, which includes pre-surveys and data entry standardization to determine the feasibility of conducting surveys in each country and the acceptable level of data quality. Finally, Professor Sung K. Cho stressed the significance of data visualization and learning a variety of analytical presentation modes other than tables.
The lecture on transnational surveys opened the students’ and faculty members’ eyes to the global perspective of research, inspired people to think and imagine about global investigations, and improved their ability to apply survey research methodology to conduct cross-cultural comparative studies.
