Article
Contextualism as an important facet of individualism-collectivism: Personhood beliefs across 37 national groups
Beliefs about personhood are understood to be a defining feature of individualism-collectivism (I-C), but they have been insufficiently explored, given the emphasis of research on values and self-construals. We propose the construct of contextualism, referring to beliefs about the importance of context in understanding people, as a facet of cultural collectivism. A brief measure was developed and refined across 19 nations (Study 1: N = 5,241), showing good psychometric properties for cross-cultural use and correlating well at the nation level with other supposed facets and indicators of I-C. In Study 2 (N = 8,652), nation-level contextualism predicted ingroup favoritism, corruption, and differential trust of ingroup and outgroup members, while controlling for other facets of I-C, across 35 nations. We conclude that contextualism is an important part of cultural collectivism. This highlights the importance of beliefs alongside values and self-representations and contributes to a wider understanding of cultural processes.
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how instructors could use autoethnography as a course assignment to help students understand their cultural identities and build their intercultural communication competences in higher education classroom. Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that helps people examine their relationship with a group or a culture. The chapter provides an overview of literature relevant to intercultural communication competences, social identity, and autoethnography and then describes the author's use of autoethnography in an undergraduate course “Social and Cultural Foundations of Education” taught at a large public university in the United States. In her class, the author uses this method to help students examine their cultural identity, or relationship with groups based on their religion, culture, nationality, ethnicity, or other groups relevant to the course.
Summarizing the results of different researches on intercultural interaction, we can state that people feel tension in intercultural contacts when they perceive the situation as threatening their well-being. There are also many empirical evidences that people belonging to different cultures understand well-being in different ways. This understanding depends also on social, economic and other factors. Thereby it is important to study general relationships of subjective well-being and intercultural tolerance and cultural specifics of these relationships. Objectives of the empirical study was to analyze the satisfaction with life as an important factor of cross-cultural interaction; to reveal cultural specifics of modern representations of subjective well-being, and interrelations of the styles of intercultural interaction with subjective well-being in different cultures. Methods: Scales of: Psychological well-being (Ryff), Life Satisfaction (Neugarten, Havighurst, & Tobin), Subjective Happiness (Lyubomirsky & Lepper), General Communicative Tolerance (Boiko) and Ethnic Identity Types (Soldatova, Ryzhova), Student’s T-test, Spearman's rank correlation. Sample: 330 persons (18-55 years old) of 10 different nations and 5 religions. By the time of the survey, all the participants had lived in Russia for some (not less than 3) years, all of them lived in some biggest Russian cities.Results: It was discovered, that people’s satisfaction with their lives directly relates to general and intercultural tolerance. People, more satisfied with their lives, are usually better control their negative emotions, adapt to changing situations, forgive others’ mistakes. Such people admit their and others’ ethnicity and more rarely exhibit extremism in inter-ethnic relations, although they often avoid contact with other ethnic groups. Cross-cultural differences in well-being were revealed among residents of modern Russian big cities. In particular, people belonging to the Jewish religion, were significantly more satisfied with their lives than all the others were. People brought up in the Orthodox culture, were the least satisfied. In many subjective well-being indicators, representatives of the Buddhist and Muslim cultures showed quite good results. Different statistically significant connections between subjective well-being and tolerance were revealed in cultural subgroups. For example, for people belonging to Jewish religion, general tolerance is associated mostly with meaningfulness of life and openness to the world; and ethnic tolerance is associated to environmental mastery and personal growth. For Buddhists meaningfulness of life positively correlates with general and ethnic tolerance, and personal growth correlates only with ethnic tolerance. Muslims showed the similar results, but besides – the correlations of both types of tolerance with ppurposefulness and overall mood tone. For Orthodox Christians, both types of tolerance is mostly related to positive relations with others and overall level of subjective well-being. Conclusions: the life satisfaction and subjective well-being are important factors of intercultural interactions. There are common and culturally specific mechanisms of these factors interaction. In psychological support of cross-cultural interaction it is important to take into consideration cultural differences in well-being understanding and its relations with general and intercultural tolerance.
Three dimensions of subordinate-supervisor relations (affective attachment, deference to supervisor, and personal-life inclusion) that had been found by Chen et al. (2009) to be characteristic of a guanxi relationship between subordinates and their supervisors in China were surveyed in Taiwan, Singapore and six non-Chinese cultural contexts. The affective attachment and deference subscales demonstrated full metric invariance whereas the personal-life inclusion subscale was found to have partial metric invariance across all eight samples. Structural equation modelling revealed that the affective attachment dimension had a cross-nationally invariant positive relationship to affective organizational commitment and a negative relationship to turnover intention. The deference to the supervisor dimension had invariant positive relationships with both affective and normative organizational commitment. The personal-life inclusion dimension was unrelated to all outcomes. These results indicate the relevance of aspects of guanxi to superior-subordinate relations in non-Chinese cultures. Studies of indigenous concepts can contribute to a broader understanding of organizational behavior.
This chapter focuses on one specific way of conducting analysis of measurement invariance of latent classes. We describe group-as-covariate approach, focus on unordered latent class models, explicate levels of invariance and procedures required to test them making strong links with factor analysis, and supplement it with a detailed example. In addition to the application provided by Siegers (this volume), we describe and show how to test for metric invariance of classifications. The chapter is accompnied by an empirical illustration with basic value latent classes in West&North vs. East Europe.