Some issues in cross-national comparative research methods: a comparison of attitudes to promotion, and women's employment, in Britain and Portugal

摘要

In this note, we have drawn upon a comparative analysis of British and Portuguese data in order to explore a number of issues in cross-national comparative research. The question of commensurability is a recurring problem in comparative work. As a result of our experiences, we would be wary of attempts to comparatively investigate attitudes to 'moving up the job ladder' via survey methods alone. In the case of explanations of the level of women's full-time employment, we have pointed to the dangers of reliance on decon-textualized citations of aggregate data in order to make an argument. Considerable variation and complexity is found in the national structuring of gender relations, which are not adequately described in aggregate measures of sex differences. Thus, one of our major aims has been to argue, with Ragin, for a balance between a discourse on variables and a discourse on cases in cross-national research on women's employment. While we would certainly not wish to dismiss variable-oriented comparisons of women's employment out of hand, the very complexity of gender means that adequate explanations of particular phenomena will, inevitably, need to have recourse to case-oriented comparative work.