International Collaborations in Behavioral and Social Sciences Report of a Workshop (2008) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Appendix C: The Benefits of Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Appendix C: The Benefits of Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Pages 47-63
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 47... ...
• Export/import views of psychology. For both research and policy purposes, we often wish to move theories, procedures, or measures from one cultural group to another: the issue noted in the workshop proposal as "the applicability of American psychology to other nations." The main gain here lies in coming to understand the possibilities and the limits of such moves.
|
From page 48... ...
Let me anchor that in a specific example. I am one of a large steering committee that is working toward establishing a longitudinal study of indigenous children in Australia (a study initiated and funded by a government department)
|
From page 49... ...
One alternative -- an alternative that gives us a more specific view of what we may gain -- is to regard benefits as lying in various forms of access: access, for example, to: • Physical resources (e.g., the tools or equipment needed for various kinds of analysis) • Funding (from grants to lower-cost materials or labor)
|
From page 50... ...
This consists of turning to settings that provide variations in family patterns: variations in family size, family composition, divisions of labor or responsibility, lines of authority, the perceived value of children, arrangements for child care, parental care, or inheritances. The work of Marc Bornstein and Ken Rubin illustrates many of these variations, with an eye mainly to child development or well-being.
|
From page 51... ...
In the course of debates over nature versus nurture we have been slow to look closely at how the two might combine: the one "given," for example, fitting neatly with another (Cole and Hatano, 2006)
|
From page 52... ...
. Benefits in the form of shaken assumptions or "paradigm shifts" are clearly of major value.
|
From page 53... ...
Cultural collaborations provide ways to increase our understanding of that flow, in either direction. More specifically, I suggest, they can increase our understanding of five aspects: • The conditions that promote exports • The nature of what is exported (ideas or practices)
|
From page 54... ...
From the United States to other countries, for example, have come ideas and practices related to education (from schooling to parent education) , medical care (from pediatrics to psychiatry)
|
From page 55... ...
and evaluation practices: practices that range from the use of particular measures for developmental status (or teachers' competence) to nationwide testing at specified ages.
|
From page 56... ...
But breakfast? Changes in practices that give people the sense of being "cultural strangers" in their own land, it would seem, are what we should especially avoid when we make export moves.
|
From page 57... ...
If I were a native speaker of French, German, or Spanish, I would probably lament the move toward English only as the language for all articles in journals originally designed to be international. I still balk, however, at the required placement of quotation marks at the end of a sentence rather than at the end of a quoted phrase (cf.
|
From page 58... ...
The United States, for example, is surrounded by countries -- "developed" countries -- that make routine legal provisions for both paid annual leave and paid parental leave. For both practices there is also evidence of benefits to individuals and to families.
|
From page 59... ...
A second reason is that these analyses contain several interesting proposals that take us beyond some relatively superficial research practices: for example, the use of terms such as "participants" rather than "subjects" or -- in social policy analyses -- of "clients" or "service users" rather than "target populations." In principle, it is easy to agree that "others" have an active part to play and that we should not regard them as "objects of study." In practice, however, we have been slow to move on to the questions and issues that such principles give rise to. Cross-cultural collaborations offer us ways to do so.
|
From page 60... ...
Adding to analyses of "joint activity." The term "joint activity" is becoming widely used and will be familiar to you. Let me accordingly summarize briefly the main proposals attached to it and, again, highlight the gaps that cross-cultural collaborations could help fill.
|
From page 61... ...
It may not even be expected. More broadly, cultural analyses can help fill out the very large gap singled out in Clark's emphasis on the need to understand the rules, regulations, or etiquette of any joint activity.
|
From page 62... ...
Herdt, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
|
From page 63... ...
New York: Cambridge University Press. Langton, M
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.