This paper is about the methodological issues that have arisen in my thesis. My thesis looks at discourses around the notion of being authentic in individuals from different cultural backgrounds. It is a comparative sociology that looks for differences and similarities in these discourses between individuals from Eastern and Western backgrounds. I use a mixed method approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. I conducted a survey and did some interviews, with 138 and 20 students respectively, from La Trobe University.
My thesis uses a theoretical framework that combines the work of the sociologist Ralph Turner on self-conception and the work of the political scientist Ronald Inglehart on values.
Turner conducted a previous study on self-conception in 1973, at La Trobe University, among other universities of the English Speaking world. This study constitutes a precedent for my research, which my thesis tries to expand on. He designed a method (the True Self Method) and created some categories (the impulsive and institutional categories) for the study of self-conception that I use for my study on authenticity. Where Turner used the term self-conception, I use the term authenticity, but we both refer to the same concept.
I have used Inglehart’s work to design my cultural hypotheses for my thesis. Inglehart has done substantial empirical work that revealed cultural differences in terms of values. Based on this work and the assumption of the socialization process, I have constituted some cultural hypotheses that present a relationship between individuals’ cultural background, as related to the Eastern and Western divide, and their senses of authenticity. Since ideas of authenticity are inextricably related to one’s own values, and these values, as Inglehart’s work argues, seem to be also related to the cultural background of the respondent, I suggest that individuals’ ideas of authenticity will be influenced by their cultural backgrounds.
The quantitative and qualitative parts of my thesis have been complementary, confirming and elaborating on my hypotheses. In the quantitative part, I did a quantitative content analysis that exposed the importance of the variable cultural background, something that Turner did not consider. In the qualitative part, despite all efforts being made not to impose Turner’s categories on my respondents’ discourses, through using Grounded Theory, my results revealed that Turner’s categories are worth resurrecting and that the qualitative analysis can explain why and how the differences pointed out in the quantitative analysis occur.