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Papers from the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology Conferences

Publication Date

2009

Abstract

Each and every thought, word, feeling or action of a person harbor a richness of meaning, opening on all the possible worlds accessible for him/her. A vision on those possible worlds, those open possibilities of action, should be of great interest for human science research. We believe that the phenomenological thinking of Edmund Husserl, reworked to adapt to the modern conception of the human sciences, can allow such an understanding of a person or a more or less large group, giving not a static picture of his mind, but a dynamic view of the ongoing process of constitution of meaning. In cross-cultural and/or intercultural comparative fields as well as developmental and educational fields, the researcher is confronted to language, in conversations, narratives, writings and texts studied, to understand the relations of individuals to their cultures. Collecting freely expressed narratives and texts, the researcher accesses the whole universe of the subject in all its richness, individual specificity and cultural and social characteristics. Hence the question of the meaning and interpretation of the narratives to be done by a lecture in intension to reconstruct the possible worlds of the subject by phenomenological analysis. MCA, “Meaning Constitution Analysis”, explores the pluralities of the significations lying in the texts and implied by it. Software, MCA – Minerva, has been developed as an efficient tool in the work of text analysis. By MCA-method any kind of text can be analyzed in a rigorous and controlled way. By allowing also for different statistical treatment of the results of the process of analysis, it might render obsolete the now almost classical distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods.

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Quod Erat Demonstrandum: From Herodotus’ ethnographic journeys to cross-cultural research

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