This week, we learned how we are going to work culture in our researchs, how we integrate culture to the researchs from different fields of psychology, and what aspects we should give importance while doing these.
First we are seeing that there are two route (Top-Down Route and Bottom-Up Route) to work culture. For top-down route author gives an example that Eastern people thinks “holistically”, whereas Western people think “analitically” makes easier to understand these routes’ differences. After that the chapter focuses on the 4 main topics: Causation, Operationalization, Sampling, and Interpretation which is summarized as COSI. For causality, the chapter gives the message we should make a good causation for the studies because “culture is not a manipulated variable”. In this part, I liked the example “principle of the drunkard’s search”. Also I understand that individualistic-collectivistic differences are important but we should not reduce cultural psychology to just this difference. About sampling, author gives information about sampling techniques, approaches and their purposes. I think authors defend approaches to be suggestive generally and also gives advantages and disadvantages of typicality, just minimal difference, expert, and inversion approaches and compare them. In the sampling part, I have learned Mechanical Turk which makes able researchers to reach specific samples they want to work with, in their researches, and I think it’s a big creation.
In the operationalization part, authors first focus on the language translations and its possible problems. The research held by Skandinavian researchers about “family meal” made with their Indian contacts was very interesting but it was hard to find something about this research was very hard. In the interpretation part, authors discuss the paths researchers should follow in their studies and possible bias can be found about cultural aspects, and gives informations about what should be done when the data do not converge.
In this weeks article, Miguel Silan introduces the cross-indigenous approach. This approach argues that if we want to study cultures we shouldn’t study the cultures by just comparing them with the Western cultures. We should first work cultures indigenously and compare them not by Western standards. Again we should create techniques special to cultures we want to work and compare them accordingly to it. I think cross-indigenous approach should be a must for psychologists because it seems like the most logical way to save psychology from the WEIRD circle problem.
Leave a Reply