Organizational Aspects of Cross-National Social Research.

The article focuses on the organizational aspects of cross-national social research. International cooperation in the planning, conduct and utilization of research in the social sciences has taken on increasing importance during the years since the end of World War II, but very little has yet been done to analyze the methodological and organizational problems of such research cooperation. More and more social scientists have begun to see their theories, their data and their findings in cross-cultural and cross-national perspectives, but few have given much thought to the problems of effective organization for comparative research across cultural and national boundaries. An attempt will be made to clarify some of the problems as they appear after three years' experience in the administration of a program of cross-national social research in Western Europe. Cross-national research is a relative newcomer in the vocabulary of social science. It is gaining acceptance as a convenient term for comparative inquiries taking nations, national populations, or equivalent sections of national populations as their units of comparison.