CONCEPTS AND RESEARCH METHODS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 5:
“CULTURALLY SENSITIVE RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODS IN
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY”

By:
MUWAGA MUSA
NPM: 190220093001

PROGRAM MAGISTER PSIKOLOGI SOCIAL

FACULTY OF PSYCHOLOGY
UNIVERSITAS PADJADJARAN
BANDUNG 2010

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INTRODUCTION

We use the word culture in many different ways in everyday language and discourse.
Sometimes we use the word culture to mean race, nationality, or ethnicity. For
example, we often refer to people of African American ancestry as coming from African
American culture, or Chinese people as coming from Chinese culture. But we also use
the word culture to reflect trends in music and art, food and clothing, rituals,
traditions, and heritage. In short, we use the word culture to refer to many different
things about people—physical and biological characteristics, behaviors, music, dance,
and other activities. Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952) and later Berry, Poortinga, Segall,
and Dasen (1992) have described six general categories in which culture is discussed;
descriptive, historical, normative, Psychological and Genetic .

It was once assumed that the bedrock concepts of social psychology held true for all the
world's peoples. More recently, post-modern approaches to research in the field have expanded
on these Western models, building a psychology that takes into account the sociopolitical,
historical, religious, ecological, and other indigenous factors that make every culture, as well as
every person as agents of their own actions. Indigenous and Cultural Psychology surveys
psychological and behavioral phenomena in native context in various developing and
developed countries, with particular focus on Asia.
An international team of 28 experts clarifies culture-specific concepts (such as paternalism and
the Japanese concept of amae), models integrative methods of study, and dispels typical
misconceptions about the field and its goals. The results reflect culturally sound frames of
reference while remaining rigorous, systematic, and verifiable. These approaches provide a
basis for the discovery of true psychological universality if any that exists as under lying
facts .Cultural researchers are now offer levels, offering groundbreaking findings on
understudied concepts, and signaling future directions in universal knowledge in the fields of
social psychology.

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Social psychology is distinguished by its attention to the power of the situation and to the
dynamics of social groups. Not only, but also highly sensitive to the active role of the observer
in making sense of the experience. However, even with this sensitivity to group dynamics and
to the processes of individual constructiveness and making meaning of experience, the field
gives little attention to culture in its theories and methods. This work offers methodological
strategies for enhancing cultural sensitivity of social psychology as strategies are critically
increasing the field’s theoretical power and its explanations in depth, as well as its applied
relevance. While emphasizing issues like sampling, choice of procedure, and interpretation of
findings.

It must be recalled that psychological experience always occurs in and is, in part, constituted
by sociocultural processes, resulting in a need to take culture into account in all research
designs, even in work conducted by single populations. There are many answers to the
questions why cultural values must be considered in social psychological research?
Chief among them is, there is need to pay attention to culture for methodological control
purposes, like individuals back ground, knowledge, and experiences or out looks that may
affect their understanding of methodological procedures not having equivalent meaning for
different subgroups.
The second motive for attending to cultural issues is for theory testing purposes. This type of
concern is guided by assessing the assumed universality of existing psychological theories
through sampling culturally diverse populations, as well as identifying mediating or
moderating variables that affect the manifestation of particular psychological effects.

Culturally based research is also increasingly guided by theory construction goals. This type of
approach is concerned not merely with identifying diversity in modes of psychological
functioning but also with identifying the previously ignored or unrecognized cultural
dependence of existing theories. It’s clear that previous cognitive and experimental
interpretations of age changes were incomplete and that it was critical to recognise cultural
processes as contributing to such age changes, and these developmental changes in social
attribution are culturally variable rather than universal as previously assumed.

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In summary, taking cultural considerations into account in social psychological research is
needed not only for the methodological reasons of ensuring the validity of assessment
techniques , but also for theoretical reasons of testing the universality of psychological theories
and of formulating new conceptual models .Extending beyond merely an understanding of
diversity in psychological functioning , such attention can provide new process understanding
of the psychological functioning of widely studied western populations .

DOWN PLAYING OF CULTURAL ISSUES IN SOCISL PSYCHOLOGY

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in cultural issues in psychological research
though with limited emphasis. Whereas increasing efforts are being made to sample culturally
diverse subgroups, most contemporary social psychological research centers on middle-class,
college populations which have constituted social psychological inquiry.

To give increasing attention to sociocultural considerations in social psychology, its critical to

understand why culture tends to be down played in the field. It’s this type of concern that must
be addressed to gain greater understanding of cultural process and their role in psychological
phenomenon as well as adopting a more culturally sensitive methodological strategy.

Reasons for downplaying culture in social psychological research

The reasons for this occurrence in social psychology are both conceptual and empirical. These
factors reflect long standing assumptions in the field about the nature of social psychological
explanations as well as disappointment with the findings from various traditions of culturally
based psychological research.

(a) Cultural-free approach to situation

One of the major contributions of social psychology is its emphasis of situations affecting
behavior. It’s this insight that underlies some of the early research documents which hold that
situational influence can lead to antisocial behavior such as in milligram conformity
experiment (milligram 1963). In another example,
“This type of insight also informs contemporary researchers on priming and
on the mere exposure effect, work that is documenting the power of the

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 situation to influence behavior in ways that are outside individuals’
conscious awareness” (kale and cornel 1990 ).

As approached with in this dominant perspective, the situation is treated as presenting a

veridical structure that can be known through inductive and deductive information processing.
It’s assumed that validity in judgment arises from differences in the information available to
individuals or from differences in their informative processing, resulting in certain judgments
being more or less cognitive adequate or varied than others.

This view of situation gives rise to explanatory frameworks focused on factors in the situation
and in the person. Within such framework, culture is viewed merely as casual factor with
impacts on psychological findings rather than as a factor that its self contributes additional
explanatory force.

Equally culture may be treated as an individual difference, an attitude that is seen, as an

example enthusiasm shown for assessing culture through individualism/collectivism. From
such perspective, cultural group membership is viewed as giving rise to individual differences,
attitude, understanding, and consideration that already is taken into account in social
psychological explanation, through the field’s present attention to individual differences.

(a) Physical science ideal explanation,

The tendency to downplay cultural considerations stems from the field’s embrace of an
idealized physical science model of explanation. Higgin and krunglanski (1996) explained this
type of stance involves a view of psychological science as the search for deep structural
explanatory mechanism.

“A discovery of lawful principles governing nature of phenomenon is a

fundamental objective of scientific research not only that, but also a useful
scientific analysis needs of probe beneath the surface. In other words, it needs to
get away from the phonotypic manifestation and strive to unearth genotypes that
may luck beneath’’.

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In adopting this vision as a dominant research paradigm, social psychology has a tendency to
consider cultural consideration as mere content effects and thus factors that ideally should be
held constant in order to focus on isolating more fundamental underlying psychological
mechanism. (Malpass 1988)

(c) Apparent universality and explanatory breadth of psychological theories

The limited interest shown in cultural research with in social psychology also reflects the
sense within the discipline that social psychological findings, in fact, have been documented in
most cases to be cross –culturally robust and to have considerable explanatory scope. It’s thus
concluded that there is no cultural differences that exists in basic psychological phenomenon
(Brown, 1991).

The conclusion in apparent universality in cross culture research is linked with methodological
strategies of administering existing research instruments in diverse culture settings, after
making only minor changes in their content to ensure familiarity, and narrowing the scope of
phenomenon being investigated in ways that exclude possibly significant cultural variations.
An example of the strategy of adopting methodological procedures arguably exclude
potentially significant sources of variations may be seen in research of coding of emotional
facial expression. The widely accepted conclusion of fundamental similarity in basic emotions
concepts that have emerged from extensive cross culture research conducted on this topic.
(Ekiman 1992; Izard 1992) stems, at least in part, from the use of procedure that tend to gloss
over potentially significant sources of variations in emotion concepts, such as how different
emotions are expressed in everyday language usage, and that downplay the significance of
localized emotion terms whose translation into English language are inaccurate .

(d) Disappointment with recent cultural traditions of research

Downplaying the significance of cultural research also reflects certain confusion with cultural
research that was stimulated by markus and kitayama’s (1991) there articles are the widely
cited in social psychology and it has given rise to extensive research with the focus of
examining the extent to which variation in psychological functioning can be predicted by scale
measures.

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However, recent criticisms of this rapidly growing literature make clear the results observed
utilizing scale measures of independent/interdependent self-construal’s have been
disappointing (Hong , morris chiu 2000,2002) much of the work has been associated with
stereotypical stance that gloss over important distinction between and within cultures and that
gives insufficient attention to the impact of context behavior .The same type of sophisticated
understanding of situational influences that is evident in main stream social psychology
research is not evident in this type of social psychological work , which much of is focused on
cultural questions. Notably, work in this tradition is also yielding findings that, in some cases,
appear to contradict directly the claims of the interdependent/independent self-construal
paradigm.

CONCEPTUAL ISSUES IN GIVING MORE ATTENTION TO CULTURE,

Before turning directly to these methodological strategies, there is need to pay attention to
conceptual issues that respond to some of the reasons for the fields downplaying of culture
noted, these consideration bear on the nature of culture and its influence on psychological
processes.

Cultural views

From an ecological view, culture is understood as adoptions to the varying requirements of

contrasting physical and social structural environment .Ecological approaches to culture are of
value in highlighting the varied resources and constraints that individual of different social
cultural communities experience and that influence their behaviors. It may be noted, that
whereas ecological approaches to culture extend the dominant social psychology models in
their recognition that the adaptive context for psychological development is culturally variable,
rather than universal, these approaches retain a view of the context as an objective
environment. In this respect, such approaches do not challenge the traditional social
psychology explanatory focus on features of the person and the objective situation.

It’s important to compliment ecological approaches to culture with approaches that are
symbolically grounded. Symbolic approaches treat culture as shared meanings that are
embodied in artifacts and practices that form human development (Cole, 1995; R.A.Le Vine,
1984). It’s recognised that cultural meanings and practices not only represent experience but
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also construct experience in serving to create social realities (Bartlett 1932). Not do social
institutions depend on culture definitions but even psychological concepts are recognized.

Challenging the identification of cultural processes exclusively with the situational factors
taken into account in social psychological explanation, a symbolic approach to culture
highlights the need to recognise that cultural meanings do not bear one-to-one relationship to
objective aspects of the situation. Culture then cannot be understood merely by consideration
of particular objectives but instead requires taking into account cultural beliefs, values and
practices that are not purely functionally based.

Integrating cultural considerations with situational and person factors

It must be noted that cultural considerations complete but do not replace the focus on
situational and personal factors in social psychological explanation. This implies that
hypothesis involving cultural influences need to be formulated in ways that take into account
both variations and human differences. Equally, it must be recognised that in many cases the
impact of individual differences and situational factors may themselves be culturally variable.

METHODOLOGICAL STRATEGIES FOR ENHANCING CULTURAL SENSITIVITY

The key to enhancing the cultural sensitivity of social psychology is to understand culture and
its role in psychological functioning. Attention must be paid to culture as ecological context
and presents certain objective affordance and constraints, as well as to culture as a symbolic
environment that entails certain meanings and practices that are not entirely functionally based.
it must be recognised that a consideration of culture does not replace an attention to person and
situational factors but contributes an additional dimension to social psychological explanation
Methodological strategies for enhancing cultural sensitivity, the strategies include those which
are important not only in comparative research but also in research that does not focus on
cultural questions and / or on tapping culturally diverse populations. Given the reality of
psychology, experience always occurring in specific context, sensitivity to cultural issues is
needed in all social psychological investigations.

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(a) Cultural understanding,

In working to gain an understanding of cultural sensitivity that differ from the researchers
background, it’s important to seek cultural knowledge that, as far as feasible and specific to the
particular group under consideration. This implies that researchers should avoid turning to the
widely utilized scale measures of individualism/collectivism to provide this kind of insight,
because of the limited cultural sensitivity of such measures (miller, 2002). Fortunately,
whereas some commitment is required on the part of the researcher to make the necessary
effort to acquire a greater understanding of other cultural view points, many strategies are
available for achieving this goal.

(1) One valuable strategy for obtaining knowledge about other cultures involves
drawing from relevant research literature in related fields, such as anthropology and
sociolinguistic. One can see the same kind of knowledge as having informed
perspective adopted by Markus and Kitayama (1991) in their article on culture and
the self. Although they proposed a global distinction linked to individualism/
collectivism, the references cited in their article are grounded in interdisciplinary
research of Japan.

(2) Collaborating with a member of the comparison cultural community under

consideration. This represents another valuable strategy for gaining cultural
knowledge which may be particularly useful in cases in which there is little or no
available research literature on a particular community, ideally, such collaborations
should include researchers who have both inside and outside knowledge of the cultures
under consideration. Collaborations of this kind have been generative in recent cultural
research in social psychology, as illustrated by great numbers of studies being
conducted involving researchers drawn from United States and from various East Asian
cultural groups (J i and Nisbett 2000; Peng and Nisbett 1999)

(3) A form of organised small-group discussions, focus groups constitute small

groups that investigators assemble and engage in processes of informal group
discussions, as a means of tapping participant’s personal experience and reactions on
particular topics (Powell and single, 1996 p, 499). The goal of focus groups is to make
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 possible the gathering of qualitative information regarding the attitudes, beliefs, and
feelings of participants as expressed within a group context. Focus group offer the
advantage of being highly flexible and can be employed effectively both to explore
general culture concerns and to tap respondents open-ended reactions to issues
identified as theoretical interest in a particular research program .

(b) Sampling

The growing need to understand cultural implications has influenced different types of
sampling strategy to be employed in the hunt for accurate data about cultures, the need to go
beyond samples has been emphasised in the national institute of health’s recent report to
address minority inclusion as part of all currently submitted grant proposals. The following are
the sampling strategies to be employed to ensure accuracy and reliability of findings and to
make inferences that are of empirical findings.

(c)Noncomparative “prototypic “sampling strategy

This strategy is intended to manipulation situations or assessing individual difference, while

tapping population that is treated although it’s homogenous and can provide grounds for
making universal claims. In an effort to increase cultural sensitivity of this type of sampling
practice, it’s essential not only for researchers to acknowledge potential limitations on the
generality of their findings from this type of design but also to give greater conceptual attention
to the nature of these limitation . It’s important for researchers to address what specific respects
a claim may be anticipated to be culturally bound or alternatively, in short, serious attention
needs to be given to the cultural meaning of research findings, even when employing sampling
design that are Noncomparative in nature and not explicitly focused on cultural questions.

Thus, whenever there are sufficiently large numbers of participants in different cultural
subgroups to make this easy, effort should be made to conduct separate analysis of effects
within subgroups to observe empirically whether similar results obtain in all cases. It’s
recommended that subgroups be analysed at levels that are linked with cultural traditions and
that attend as well to issues of socioeconomic status. It’s that analysis of this type be
undertaken in ways that are sensitive to areas of overlap and intermixing between subgroups.

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 (d)Noncomparative cultural sampling strategies

This applies to research that focus on cultural questions. These projects generally are
motivated either by a concern with obtaining normative data or by the methodological
requirements of particular research methodologies, such as ethnographic or case study
approaches.
Sampling of single cultural populations is increasingly being adopted in research as a means
of working expanding the normative baseline for psychological theory, with such efforts
encouraged by major U.S funding organisations, such as national science foundation (NSF)
and national institute of health (NIH), in their issuing of specific calls for research with
underrepresented minority populations. It is recognised that psychological theory can
effectively be made more culturally inclusive only when its descriptive base is broadened to
include information about psychological functioning in diverse cultural samples.

(e)Comparative cultural sampling strategy

This design is employed commonly in research that tests the universality of particular
psychological effects or that examines cultural variations in theories. In such work, it’s
important for sampling decisions to be culturally sensitive.

In utilizing comparative study to examine cultural influence on social psychological

phenomenon, greater consideration must be given to the distinctive nature of cultural
orientation. Equally, greater attention needs to be paid to the overlap of cultural perspectives.
Thus the concern with affection and respect that Robin Harwood (1995) have found to central
to the outlooks on attachment as emphasised by Puerto Rican mothers differs not only in
balancing autonomy but also connectedness as emphasised among Euro-Americans and
assumed with in attachment theory.

Representativeness and equivalence in sampling

Although it’s important to address concerns about the anticipated cultural generality of results,
it must also be recognised that representativeness sampling is not an essential feature of

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culturally based research designs, and with the exception of large –scale surveys, it’s rarely
achieved in social psychology. This implies that researchers should not utilize representative
sampling as a criterion in evaluating culturally based psychology research because such
standards would lead to that kind of to rendered negative with the exception of large scale
survey designs.

As a way of criterion of samples being representative, however, concern needs to be given

to a achieving equivalence in the population tapped in the comparative studies and in
individuals responses to reach stimuli. To control for possible confounding preexisting
groups differences, use of statistical control is emphasised. The inclusion of control
samples in research design is a valuable strategy that may be employed in efforts to rule out
alternative interpretations of particular effects related to sampling ----a technique that is
particularly valuable in two group designs, given the many uncontrolled sources of
variation that may influence any effect.

Culture as a process

Social psychology has since emphasised the use of scale measure of independent
interdependent as well as other measures of collectivism/individualism as developed by
researchers in the tradition of cross- culture psychology. However, serious limitation exist in
both of these strategies, leaving a need to adopt more dynamic methodological approaches
measures of individualism/collectivism are also problematic in treating psychological
processes as bearing one-one cultural outlook ,as an attitude that fails to recognise the extent
to which behavior is normatively based rather than reflective of individual attitudes or
personality .

It’s also problematic to utilize priming approaches to stimulate cultural processes and to
measure individualism/collectivism. It’s not possible to interpret a particular behavioral
response, such as dispositional inference, that might be primed as reflective on an
individualistic or collectivist outlook without understanding other cultural meanings to which
the response is linked.

In an effort to understand culture, it’s recommended that researchers adopt process –oriented
approach cultural (Greenfield, 1997). This includes tapping more directly the psychological
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processes that are implicated in particular culturally variable psychological responses as well
as assessing the everyday cultural routines and practices that support such responses.

Methodological approaches that can tap the psychological processes underlying particular
effects include such strategies as assessing on line processing as well as identifying culturally
variable patterns of functional relationship (Katayama, 2002). On line processing involves
evaluating information immediately as it’s encountered and contrasts with the cognitive
processing based on long-term memory.

The use of on line processing, is intended to explore cultural influence illustrated in a recent
comparative study on the correspondence bias, an attribution tendency in which an individual
characters are seen as corresponding to his or her behaviors even when the behavior is socially
limited. This investigation not only demonstrated that Japanese respondents are less vulnerable
to this bias than are the U.S. respondents but also showed that this difference is linked to
contrasting types of online attitudinal inferences. The approach identifies also cultural variable
partners of functional relationships is illustrated in cross-culture research highlighting the
contrasting cultural meanings accorded to shyness, and it was demonstrated that whereas social
attitude tend to linked to negative outcomes in an American setting, its linked to positive
family and school outcomes with china (chen,Rubin, and li, 1995).

Culturally appropriate measures,

It’s important to consider the sensitivity of cultural issues in social psychological research.
This sensitivity is a matter of ensuring that measures are equivalent in meaning for different
populations and that they are culturally informative. In terms of ensuring equivalence of
measuring instruments in different cultural or sub-cultural populations, it’s important not
merely to adopt such conventional strategies as the use of back translation but also to take into
account the contrasting expectations, social knowledge, values and modes of communication
maintained by individuals of different sub-cultural backgrounds.

Interestingly, this type of differences can lead various populations to experience difficulty in
responding to multiple choice questions. Thus in research among the Zinacantencan maya,
Greenfield and Childs (1977) observed that respondents with limited levels of education
treated the multiple options provided in questionnaire as partners to be put together to create a
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large meaning , rather than as a discreet options whose only function is to test understanding.
The social context of testing situation also may affect the level of comfort that individuals
experience in testing situations and their readiness to respond. Thus, social psychologists must
keep in mind that some populations from different sub-cultural background are more reluctant
to answer questions in a standard interviewing situation. (Delgado –Gaitan , 1994; Greenfield
1997b).

In turn, to ensure cultural inclusiveness in research, it’s critically important to recognise that
many assessment instruments currently in use involve culturally specific assumptions and need
to be broadened conceptually co accommodate the diverse outlooks of contrasting cultural and
sub-cultural populations. Until this is done, the field will continue to yield results that luck
sufficient cultural sensitivity to tap the cultural variability that exists. The present
considerations highlight the need for researchers to be more aware of the extent to which the
response options provided in questionnaire may luck sufficient cultural sensitivity to succeed
in tapping the outlooks of diverse cultural populations. It’s also important to utilize assessment
instruments that are less constraining of response options and more accommodating to diverse
cultural viewpoints.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, being more culturally in social psychological research is of much
importance. As Matsumoto (2001) recently commented “all psychologists are cross cultural in
some way” the difference is whether they are aware of the cultures being studied, and weather
these comparison is explicit or implicit in their work. Equally critical, is the need to overcome
the competency of social psychology which has resulted in relegating culture to a peripheral
role as a mare descriptive enterprise with little implication to the basic theories. Taking cultural
considerations into account in social psychology promises to yield a richer understanding of
basic psychological processes and of diversity of outlooks that characterize human
psychological functioning.

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