Reflections on a Cross‐National Qualitative Study of Within‐Household Finances

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12033
• Author: Lasse Reinikainen,Charlott Nyman,Janet Stocks
• Published date: 01 June 2013
• Date: 01 June 2013

CHARLOTT NYMAN AND LASSE REINIKAINEN Ume˚

a University

JANET STOCKS Trinity Washington University∗

Ref‌lections on a Cross-National Qualitative Study

of Within-Household Finances

This report presents some ref‌lections on and

experiences from a cross-national qualita-

tive research project about within-household

f‌inances conducted by sociologists from Ger-

many, Spain, Sweden, and the United States.

The authors focus f‌irst on the challenges of

making qualitative cross-national comparisons

and argue for the importance of establishing a

common understanding of methodological and

theoretical aspects. They then go on to consider

the relevance of political – cultural context

for understanding within-household distribution

of resources. They suggest that meanings of

money are inf‌luenced by understandings of gen-

der, which in turn inf‌luence and are inf‌luenced

by welfare regimes. They then present a few out-

comes from a cross-national analysis of results

from Spain, Sweden, and the United States. They

conclude the article by suggesting that com-

parisons on the level of results rather than on

the level of primary data is a viable option for

qualitative cross-national analysis.

Department of Sociology, Ume˚

a University, 90187 Ume˚

a,

Sweden (charlott.nyman@soc.umu.se).

∗School of Education, Trinity Washington University, 125

Michigan Ave., Washington, DC 20011.

This article was edited by Fran Bennett.

Key Words: cross-national comparative research, family

economics, family roles, gender, housework/division of

labor, qualitative research.

In the late 1990s, a group of sociologists

from Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United

States embarked on a qualitative cross-national

research project based on in-depth interviews

about how couples organize their daily lives

together. The ways in which couples orga-

nized their f‌inances and allocated money and

consumption were the specif‌ic focus for the

study. In addition to contributing to the grow-

ing body of knowledge about this f‌ield of

research, this focus would also serve as a

lens through which one could investigate sev-

eral aspects of the couples’ lives (D´

ıaz, Dema,

&Ib

´

a˜

nez, 2007; Evertsson & Nyman, 2012;

Ludwig-Mayerhofer, Allmendinger, Hirseland,

& Schneider, 2011; Nyman & Reinikainen,

2007; Stocks, D´

ıaz, & Haller¨

od, 2007; Wilson

& Stocks, 2007). In this article, we discuss some

aspects of this collaborative research project

by sharing experiences concerning theoreti-

cal and methodological aspects of conducting

cross-national qualitative research on within-

household distribution. Methodological aspects

of this cross-national and cross-cultural collabo-

ration will be the main focus of this article. We

will, however, use examples from our data and

our analyses to exemplify and illustrate these

issues. We will discuss some of the rewards,

challenges, decisions, questions, and discussions

involved in this cross-national collaboration and

what this meant for our analyses of our data.

The major issue we address is how to con-

duct comparative analyses of data that consist

of interviews in different languages and that are

640 Journal of Marriage and Family 75 (June 2013): 640 –650

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12033