The Culture and Language of Psychology

The Culture and Language of Psychology



Table Of content

Introduction3

Research Background3

Chapter 2: Literature Review4

Developmental Research in Cultural Psychology7

Challenges and Contributions10

Chapter 3: Methodology12

Research Design12

Literature Search13

References14

The Culture and Language of Psychology

Introduction

Posing an issue that persists over time in the field of psychology, Michael Cole introduced his recent volume on cultural psychology with a central puzzle: why "psychologists find it so difficult to keep culture in mind" (Cole, 1996, p. 1). As Cole observes: "On the one hand, it is generally agreed that the need and ability to live in the human medium of culture is one of the central characteristics of human beings. On the other hand, it is difficult for many academic psychologists to assign culture more than a secondary, often superficial role in the constitution of our mental life" (p. 1). Psychologists routinely turn to culture for methodological control purposes, to confirm the universality of existing psychological theories or to identify factors that mediate or moderate particular psychological outcomes. Attention is paid to culture in these methodological and hypothesis testing senses, but culture tends to be given relatively little weight and to be viewed as nonessential in forming psychological constructs and theory.

Research Background

Addressing this puzzle, this chapter explores the role of culture in understanding basic psychological processes. Through an overview of illustrative research in cultural psychology, the case is made that culture needs to be understood as critical to developmental psychology in a theoryconstruction sense, one that stands to enrich the field both conceptually and methodologically. In turn, the argument is forwarded that developing more sophisticated understandings of culture and overcoming the cultural insularity of core psychological constructs and methods constitute central challenges that must be met to succeed in identifying the constitutive role of culture in basic developmental processes and to create what is truly a more universal discipline.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

Culture in Contemporary Developmental Psychology

With their sensitivity to contextual influences on behavior, developmental psychologists routinely attend to culture for methodological control as well as purposes of theory confirmation. In the former sense, for example, it is widely recognized that methodological bias may result if methodological procedures are not equivalent in meaning for individuals from differing age and cultural subgroups. It is this type of insight that has led researchers of cognitive development to emphasize the importance of using materials as well as response modes that are familiar to respondents; such insight has also made it possible to identify the presence of greater cognitive competences among various cultural populations than was once assumed, on the basis of their low scores on conventional intelligence test measures (Greenfield, 1997), In terms of theory-confirmation purposes, culture is commonly taken into account in contemporary developmental psychology in testing the universality of existing theories. Most major developmental theories are routinely subject to cross-cultural testing to assess their presumed universality and identify processes that may account for variation in the rate of development or in the highest level of development ...