Cultural and insider perspectives (Psychology HL)

In one line: Every account of a behaviour is given from somewhere: from inside the culture that practises it, or from outside.

In much of the world, babies sleep in their parents' bed for years. In some Western countries, advice to parents has long been to put a baby in a separate room.

A researcher from the second tradition who visits the first may describe shared sleeping as a habit that delays independence. Parents there may see a baby alone in a room as neglect. Each is describing the other's practice from outside.

Remember: A description of a behaviour is also a description of the describer's viewpoint.

Key idea: The emic and etic approaches are two research strategies, each with a purpose.

For sleep, an etic study would record where babies sleep in thirty countries and relate it to a measure of later independence. An emic study would ask parents in one community what sleeping together is for, and what kind of adult they hope to raise.

The etic study assumes that independence is the right outcome to measure. Where parents value closeness and duty to family more highly, that assumption is ethnocentric.

In sequence: Emic research can come first, to find out which concepts matter locally.

Etic comparison that follows is then built on measures that fit.

Key idea: A researcher's own position in relation to the group shapes access, understanding and interpretation.

Neither position is neutral. What matters is that the researcher says which one she holds and considers how it may have shaped what she was told and what she made of it. This is reflexivity, applied to culture.

Exam tip: In a source or a study, find the researcher's relation to the participants.

Then give one thing that position made possible and one thing it put at risk.

Key idea: Indigenous psychologies are ways of understanding mind and behaviour that grow out of Indigenous communities themselves.

Indigenous psychologies are distinct from mainstream Western psychology. They draw on a community's own history, beliefs and practices, and they often treat the person as inseparable from family, land and ancestors.

Social and emotional well-being: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia describe health as social and emotional well-being.

It rests on connections: to body and mind, to family and community, to culture, to land, and to ancestors. A person whose tie to land is broken may be unwell in a way that a checklist of symptoms does not register.

Two things follow for research. Measures written for Western populations may miss what matters, so findings about "mental health" in these communities may be misleading. And research is expected to be done with the community: planned together, with the community's consent, and of benefit to it.

Remember: Western psychology is itself a cultural perspective.

Taking another perspective seriously is not a concession. It is a way of finding out what the first one could not see.

How this is asked: On Paper 1, one 15-mark essay links a concept to a context. For perspective it may be a claim that a model from one culture applies to all.

Knowledge of specific studies is not assessed. The argument is.

The trap: everything is relative: To say that no comparison between cultures is possible gives up too much.

Some patterns are shared. The question is which, and how we know.