Marfo – catching data  

Now, I bet you that these international organizations when they get the data are not going to analyze the local data-right?  They don’t think it’s that important.  I really don’t.  I’m yet to see a major project that gathered international data, that then reported findings for individual countries.  We are always going for the gold.  We can catch both worlds.  And the way you do it is to make sure that there are the things that are instruments that get at the commonalities.   

Now, I’m not convinced, however that after we even know how to capture what we call the commonalities, because very often when we say that it means that we have an instrument that was developed in Canada or the United States that we are going to  try to use across the board. Right?  And even when we think we are trying to make it more valid for other places, we think of adaptations and very often what we mean by adaptation is translating it from one language to another. Actually the linguistic translation does not necessarily give you the basis for comparison because the conceptual underpinnings of those items could be very, very different.  You know, so in one culture you think of the concept of conservation and people understand it.  You go into another culture, they have no idea what it means.  So even the process of recognizing the limits of comparisons it requires us to do more.  But guess what?  To do more very often is either very expensive or demanding of our time and effort and we are a world that believes in getting things done as quickly as possible and we use tools, not because somebody has decided that these are the best tools to use.  Very often we use those tools because they are the tools we have.