Introduction to Deaf Children in China continued...
Certain problems are characteristic of all cross-cultural research. My knowledge of Chinese and my personal experience of living and working in China were useful in developing an understanding of the issues I was investigating; the background documentary study undertaken before the field research was also helpful in this respect. Nevertheless, I am not Chinese—I am still essentially a cultural outsider and thus must address the question of the extent to which any outsider can accurately, sensitively, and fairly interpret data embedded in a cultural context in which he or she is a nonnative. For example, I became aware that my own attitudes toward deafness and deaf people, reinforced in the academic center in the United Kingdom where I was based, may have led me to assume that respondents in China had similar views and to underestimate how incapacitating and undesirable the Chinese perceive deafness to be (a perception that is of course common in other countries and cultures as well). After informally discussing the topic with several Chinese colleagues, I realized that I had to be more careful in interpreting evidence concerning attitudes toward deafness in China—without going to the other extreme and finding prejudice when there was little evidence for it. In general, I approached my research knowing I must be always cautious, cross-check the evidence, and be aware of how my own beliefs and attitudes might affect my interpretation of data.
At the same time, one can also argue that the position of a cultural outsider has certain advantages, as Kleinman and Lin (1981) maintain in their discussion of social research in Chinese communities. What the insider may take for granted, as natural or inevitable occurrences, can appear striking to the researcher who has experience of alternative cultural practices with which to contrast them. For example, it seemed very significant to me that parents of deaf children met only when convened by nursery school staff: they had no organized cooperative or mutual support system independent of educational institutions. Yet a Chinese researcher familiar with this cultural pattern might well have passed it over as unexceptional (conversely, a Chinese researcher studying deaf children and their families in Western countries would probably perceive phenomena and patterns of behavior that would be invisible to native observers).
The reliability and validity of research findings must be evaluated. In addition, it is necessary to assess their generalizability—the extent to which findings from the research sample or samples can be assumed to be true of other similar populations. The key question here is how applicable the findings from the interviews and letters are to other families with preschool-age deaf children in China. The question arises with particular force because the study, while based on in-depth interviews with parents, involved a relatively small number of respondents.
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