East-West European project: transforming and shaping research through collaboration

Abstract

This article tells the story of the journey made by an international research group of social psychologists in their collaborative projects carried out over a number of years after the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989. The article explores some relations between the aims of research conducted during a period of rapid political, social and economic change in Central and Eastern Europe, and the ways these studies were shaped and transformed through collaboration. It shows how the collaboration of researchers in the team affected the development of theoretical concepts and methodological ideas over the years, as well as how the team learned from mistakes. Collaborative efforts cannot be viewed separately from the content of research. Moreover, this international collaborative research has shown that the relationships between institutional and cultural changes cannot be understood by means of comparing phenomena across different countries but by case studies in individual countries.