Tag Archives: intercultural

Janet Harkness- the passing of a great mind in survey research

I just received this announcement from WAPOR. This is sad news. I attended an AAPOR short course that she helped to teach in the Spring of 2010, and she was very sharp, insightful and kind. At the time I was researching multilingual, multinational and multicultural surveys, and her writing was one of my mainstays.

“Janet Harkness died on Memorial Day (May 28, 2012) in Germany at age 63.  Harkness was the Director of the Survey Research and Methodology graduate program and Gallup Research Center, and holder of the Donald and Shirley Clifton Chair in Survey Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  She was the founder and Chair of the Organizing Committee on the International Workshop on Comparative Survey Design and Implementation (CSDI).  Her many contributions to cross-national and cross-cultural survey research included service as Head of the International Social Survey Programme’s Methodology Committee (1997-2008),  board member of the National Science Foundation’s (USA) Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences Advisory Board (2008-present),  board member of the  Deutsches Jugendinstitut (Germany) Advisory Board (2009-present), Co-initiator of the Cross-Cultural Survey Guidelines Initiative, Chair of the Organizing Committee for the International Conference on Survey Methods in Multicultural, Multinational and Multiregional Contexts (3MC, Berlin 2008), and member of the European Social Survey’s (ESS) Central Coordinating Team. The ESS was awarded the European Union’s top annual science award, the Descartes Prize, in 2005.  She has been a member of WAPOR since 2009.

Besides her substantial contributions and organizational achievements in cross-national survey research, Harkness made major contributions to the scholarly literature including Cross-Cultural Survey Equivalence (1998), Cross-Cultural Survey Methods (with F.J.R. Van de Vijver and P. Ph. Mohler, 2003), and Survey Methods in Multicultural, Multinational, and Multiregional Contexts (with M. Braun, B. Edwards, T.P. Johnson, L.F Lyberg, P. PH. Mohler, B. Pennell and T.W. Smith, 2010).

As her professional colleague, Don Dillman, Regents Professor at Washington State Unversity, noted of Janet “I don’t know of anyone who has done as much thinking as she has about cross-cultural surveys, and how measurement differs across languages and countries…That’s one of the major challenges we now face in doing surveys as we increasingly shift to a world-wide emphasis in survey design.”

She is survived by her husband Peter Ph. Mohler.”

——-

10/15/12 Edited to add some great news:

Announcement for the Janet A. Harkness Student Paper Award

The Janet A. Harkness Student Paper Award will be issued annually, starting in 2013, by the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) and the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) to honor the memory of Dr. Harkness and the inspiration she brought to her students and colleagues.

In particular, WAPOR and AAPOR will consider papers related to the study of multi-national/ multi-cultural/multi-lingual survey research (aka 3M survey research), or to the theory and methods of 3M survey research, including statistics and statistical techniques used in such research. Paper topics might include: (a) methodological issues in 3M surveys; (b) public opinion in 3M settings; (c) theoretical issues in the formation, quality, or change in 3M public opinion; (d) or substantive findings about 3M public opinion. The competition committee encourages submissions that deal with the topics of the annual conferences, for which the call for papers are posted on both associations’ websites in the fall.

Submissions to the Harkness award competition are anticipated to be 15-25 pages in length. A prize of $750 will be awarded to the winning paper and the author(s) of the paper will be invited to deliver it as a part of either the annual WAPOR conference, AAPOR conference, or in certain years the WAPOR-AAPOR joint conference.

For a winning paper with one author, WAPOR and AAPOR will pay for the author’s travel expenses to and from the nearest WAPOR or AAPOR annual conference for that year. However, for a winning submission with multiple authors, WAPOR and AAPOR will pay only for the primary author (or his/her designee, who must be a co-author) to present the paper. Up to two other papers each year may receive an Honorable Mention designation with each receiving a $100 cash prize (though no travel expenses).

All authors must be current students (graduate or undergraduate) at the time of the submission, or must have received their degree during the preceding calendar year. The research must have been substantially completed while the author was (all authors were) enrolled in a degree program. Preference will be given to papers based on research not presented elsewhere.

A panel of public opinion researchers from WAPOR and AAPOR’s membership – drawn from academic, government, and commercial sectors – will judge the papers.

The 2013 Call-for-Submission of papers for the Harkness Award will be issued in the near future.

Language as a way of seeing

A conversation in my Intercultural Communication class on Tuesday inspired me to think about language in a different way.

There is a fantastic paper by Charles Goodwin called Professional Vision that shows how people train each other into ways of seeing. The example he uses is an anthropological investigation of soil, and he shows how the new anthropologist is trained by the more experienced anthropologist to notice and describe gradations in the color or quality of the soil. These gradations have a specific meaning within their investigation, and being able to describe them is an important tool of the study.

Language provides two important functions that I want to focus on today. The one we think of most often is the tool function. Language gives us a way to communicate what we see. But it is much less often that we think about language as a way of seeing.

I’ve talked about our constant stimulation before on this blog. We are constantly exposed to more sensory data than we could ever process. Language provides a lens through which to see the world in front of us. Languages have inherent sets of coding structures to apply to the world.

There is another function of language that corpus and computational linguistics really highlights, and that’s habituation. We may have the tools within a language to describe something in any number of ways, but very few of these ways are actually used with any frequency. We learn in corpus linguistics that language is never random. In many ways, in fact, language follows a zipfian distribution, with a high concentration of high frequency words or expressions, and each after the most frequent exponentially less frequent.The language itself may be large, but the language we use is much smaller.

This is an important element to consider in the conceptualization of translation. One person who reviewed the original Russian translation of our Global Survey of Physicists complained that if they did not know English, they would not have understood the Russian. The more I learn about language, the more I understand how that could be possible. Language is not just grammatical, it is habitual, and it holds a way of seeing the world.