Are findings methodological artifacts of participant social and cultural context? Lessons learned studying youth resilience in stressed environments

A multisite study of youth resilience in contexts of severe climate change and economic stress in Canada and South Africa began with a common set of health-related research questions, then employed a range of individual and group approaches to qualitative data collection. Our expectation was that the choice of method (individual interview or group activity using visual and arts-based methods) would elicit different culturally-based narratives to explain the protective processes that help youth cope in stressed environments. While decolonizing methodologies holds promise for better understanding emic perspectives of wellbeing, our goal was to investigate whether changing the way data is collected could influence the quality of what is discovered. While adaptation often benefits research by making it culturally relevant, it also raises questions: (1) Are emerging findings merely artifacts of the choice of methodology, limiting (or expanding) possible explanations for psychological phenomena? (2) How does the sociocultural lens of participants shape their response to the methodology itself? Using examples from the multisite mixed methods Resilient Youth in Stressed Environments (RYSE) study, we found, contrary to our expectations, that the sociocultural context of participants exerted far more influence on their descriptions of the protective processes associated with resilience than the methodology that was used. Youth from more collectivist cultures referenced collectivist processes more often than young people from individualistic cultures, regardless of whether the methodology employed emphasized individual or group accounts of the phenomena under study. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for the design of multi-site cross-cultural research.