Postmortem scenario analysis and case studies

Post modernism is the philosophy which asserts that there is no one truth or falsehood per se, rather that each culture, group, or individual is brought up in a certain reality and experiences life and its happenings based upon his or her particular teachings, geo-historical times, and experiences. In that manner, no one particular culture can impose its ways of thinking as doctrinaire Truth since there is no Truth. Rather, Truth is relative and hinges on the manner in which the individual views his or her reality.

Opposing Western (or White) science, which the researchers view as the dominant autocratic way of thinking of one particular culture that has been foisted on unwilling other populations, the researchers will likely prefer a deductive, qualitative-based approach to the quantitative, inductive characteristics of traditional science per se. White / Western science, in other words, assesses Truth and falsehood of a particular study based on empirical results that have been fashioned by means of their particular tools. Yet, individuals and cultures (or different ethnic groups) are unlike and, therefore, cannot be unilaterally gauged, tested, and evaluated by tools formed by one particular culture. To that end, the researchers can plausibly argue, different tools and ways of evaluation have to be crafted that deal with that particular population. More so, a qualitative, rather than a quantitative approach, is in order since the qualitative approach investigates the target population up close. Individuals are plastic, chaotic, unpredictable, and flexible, and, therefore, cannot be studied in laboratory situations that deal with inflexible, homogeneous conditions. Each and every population has to be studied on its own merits and cross-cultural research methods, therefore, applied to the methodology.

In short, the Science of Western society seems to assert that human behavior is governed by universal laws and universal social processes, but who is to say that this is really so. Are western research findings, models, and theories in general and, in this case, on depression, universal? Can they generalize their results to the whole of humankind? Are their ways of understanding and measuring depression (and particularly adolescent depression) valid globally? Or are they applicable solely to Londoners rather than to Siberians or to South Africans - or to natives of some bush country who have different psychological functioning, human behavior, and alien cultural perspectives? The Postmodernist approach believes that the latter is the reality.

As per their approach, the researchers could zone in one particular culture (possibly adopting a grounded theory approach; grounded theory adopts a bottoms-up perspective -- assessing and investigating the phenomena and proposing solutions on that as opposed to traditional Science that operates in the reverse direction). As alternative, or as supplementary component, the researchers can also carry out cross-cultural comparison, for instance investigating adolescent depression in both a White and Black culture. On the one hand, there are those who argue that comparisons cannot be fashioned based on the fact that each culture is inextricably different from the other, and that acculturation so closely informs one's manner of thinking and behavior that a problem (in this case, depression) can only be understood within a specific context. Compare it to contrasting 'birds' with 'dogs'. On the other hand, researchers for cross-cultural comparison argue that, in order to best understand the syndrome as a whole, cross-cultural comparisons are in order (Breakwell et al., 2007).

Making their proposal attractive to the potential logical positivistic, styling the proposal would pragmatically necessitate that the researchers couch their proposal in logical positivistic terms. Hence, the researchers could start off by pointing to initiators of depression,

They can point to research such as that by Abramson et al. (1989) who postulate that depression is manufactured by and based on hopelessness. Do not some culture have more hopeless socio-economic political environment than others, by their very nature causing unavoidable stress? Depression, being closely related to stress, is also, accordingly, defined by political economic / political, social characteristics of different countries and populations. In that manner, depression in one particular country would be likely more common (and possibly more intense) than depression in another and, therefore, each culture needs to be studied on its own merits.

The researcher's argument can continue by pointing to scientific studies that show that availability of social support may be amongst the most important controls for limiting risk to depression (Kaufman et al. 2004) and socail supprot may, in fact, be so essential a compeotn, that it can even ameliorate negative sequalea of gene and environmental factors. One culture may have a stronger social support system then another, and, therefore, teenage depression in that culture needs to be studied locally rather than as global phenomena.