A Tale Of Two Societies: The Doing Of Qualitative Comparative Research In Hong Kong And Britain

Abstract

This paper reports on some of the challenges and benefits of international collaboration in conducting comparative qualitative research, drawing on our experience of working together on a small exploratory study of two generations of women in Britain and Hong Kong. Cross-national collaborative research is now common in Europe, a product of European funding, but it is far rarer to find qualitative, cross cultural studies of societies that are geographically and culturally more distant from each other. Moreover, texts dealing with cross-cultural qualitative fieldwork are generally based on the premise of a researcher from one culture (usually from rich countries or the global north) working in ‘other’ cultures (Liamputtong 2010; Cleary 2013) and therefore focus on issues of cultural knowledge and sensitivity. Where collaboration is mentioned it is generally in terms of outsiders working with local communities or local researchers (Cleary 2013). Our study was not of this kind. We worked as an equal partnership between two principal investigators, one Hong Kong Chinese (H) and the other white British (J) and with the intention of comparing the lives of Hong Kong Chinese and white British women, the majority ethnicities in the two locations.