Sociocultural Approach concepts

Sociocultural approach

The sociocultural approach assumes that:

• Humans are social creatures and have a need to belong

• Culture influences behavior

• People have individual and social selves

• Behavior is influenced by other people, even when we think we are acting independently (Bandura called this reciprocal determinism)

The aim of sociocultural research is to determine how people interact and influence each other

Experiment

• Procedure is standardized (replicable)

• Can establish cause and effect relationships

• Data can be statistically analyzed to determine the role of chance in the results

• A control condition is used

• Demand characteristics can occur

True experiment

Participants are randomly allocated to conditions (decreases likelihood that individual characteristics impact results)

Laboratory experiment

• Highly controlled to prevent extraneous variables

• Low ecological validity

Field experiment

• Done in a natural setting

• Cannot prevent extraneous variables and are difficult to replicate

Quasi experiment

• Participants are grouped by a trait or behavior

• Doesn’t show direct causation but implies a causal relationship (less control over pre-existing variables)

Natural experiment

• Type of quasi experiment

• The independent variable is environmental (not controlled by the researcher)

• Generally pre-test/post-test design

• Doesn’t show direct causation but implies a causal relationship

Correlational study

• Tests the correlation between variables (not cause and effect)

• Variables are only observed (not manipulated)

• Limited control (high likelihood of extraneous variables)

• High external validity (conclusions can be generalized to other populations)

Case study

• And in-depth study of an individual (or group of people) with a particular condition

• Allow researchers to study phenomena that cannot be produced ethically in a lab

• The use of triangulation increases validity

• Holistic approach

• Cannot be replicated (low reliability)

• Difficult to generalize to other people

• Cannot establish cause and effect relationships

Survey

• They produce quantitative data that can be analysed through descriptive statistics

• The Likert Scale is commonly used (5 or 7 point scale with statements expressing agreement or disagreement)

  • Allows for degrees of opinion

  • Produces ordinal data, therefore only median and mode can be applied

  • Different cultures approach Likert scale surveys differently; it was found that Japanese and Chinese participants are more likely to choose an answer close to mean or “no opinion” compared to American participants, who often chose extremes

• Social desirability can influence results

General notes about qualitative methods

Strengths:

• Rich data

• Useful for investigating complex or sensitive issues

• Explains phenomena, doesn’t just observe them

• Identifies and evaluates factors that contribute to problems

• Generates new ideas and theories

• People are studied in a natural environment, which increases ecological validity

Limitations:

• Very time consuming and generates a lot of data

• Data analysis is difficult because of the amount and lack of a clear strategy

• Data interpretation is subjective

Questionnaires

• They produce rich, qualitative data about someone's opinions and/or attitudes

• Cannot establish cause and effect

• Easy to administer and generate a lot of data

• Cannot be analysed statistically and are open to researcher bias

• Social desirability effect can happen

Participant observation

• The researcher becomes part of the group they are observing

• Can be either overt or covert

• Provides detailed and in-depth knowledge

• Researchers seek to understand why the social processes happen (decreases researcher bias)

• Provides a holistic interpretation because the researcher is accounting for many perspectives

• It is difficult to record information immediately after it happens and accurately (particularly true for covert observations)

• Time consuming and demanding (you need to observe for a long time and do data analysis)

• Researchers might lose their objectivity

Non-participant observation

• The researcher is not a part of the group they are studying

• Can be covert or overt

• Reactivity can be an issue when people know they are being observed (deception is sometimes used)

Naturalistic observation

• The observation takes place in the participants’ natural environment

• It is important for researchers not to interfere with natural behavior

• High ecological validity

• Can be used to collect data on something that would otherwise be unethical to investigate

• Potential for reactivity

• If only one person collects the data it is difficult to check it

• Credibility can be increased by extensively documenting the field work and conclusions drawn, and comparing notes between observers (inter-observer reliability)

• Ethical concerns with observing strangers without their knowledge

Etic approach*

• Behaviors are compared across cultures to determine universal behaviors

• What to study, how to analyze it, and the hypothesis are decided before the study begins

• Deductive approach

• Strengths:

  • Standardized procedures and materials → easy to replicate, reliability

  • Same surveys and tests are used → validity

  • Global applications of determining universal behaviors

• Limitations:

  • Participants might be suspicious of foreign researchers and not disclose much

  • Psychologists tend to assume the behaviors of their culture are “correct” or “normal” → biased interpretations of participants’ behavior

  • Researchers might be blind to the complexities within cultures, like subgroups

Emic approach*

• Investigates culturally-specific behaviors

• Inductive approach

• Researchers immerse themselves in the culture to develop understanding 

• Research questions are developed by interacting with local people

• Local people and knowledge aid in research

• New tests are created and adapted to carry out research

• Research is never really only emic (researchers tend to have at least some idea of what they want to study beforehand)

• Strengths:

  • Problem-focused and comes up with directly applicable solutions

  • Researchers develop a close relationship with the local community that fosters trust

• Limitations:

  • Takes a long time

  • Limited applicability

  • Low reliability (tests are made for that culture specifically)

Protection from undue stress/harm

• Undue stress is a higher level of stress than experienced on a daily basis

• Participants should not be humiliated

• Participants should not be forced to reveal private information

• Nothing should be done to participants that will permanently damage their mental or physical health

Informed consent

• Participants must be told the nature of the study before it begins (what the research is about and what potential problems might arise)

• Participants must be informed of their rights, including the right to withdraw from the study (psychologists should not pressure or coerce participants who no longer want to be in the study and their data must be withdrawn)

• Parents must give consent for children

• Parents or guardians generally give consent for those with mental or physical disabilities if they cannot understand the implications of being in an experiment

• Informed consent is difficult when the nature of the study involves complex terminology (specifically in the biological approach)

Deception

• If a psychologist tells you what an experiment is about, you might change your behavior (demand characteristics)

• Deception includes misinformation and not revealing the entire aim of the study

• Slight deception is allowed in some cases when it doesn’t cause stress to the participants, but its necessity must be justified and approved by an ethics board

Debreifing

• At the end of the experiment, participants must be told the real aims and purpose of the experiment, and any use of deception should be justified to the participants

• Participants should leave the experiment in the same physical and psychological condition they arrived in

• All data must be guaranteed to be anonymized (the identities of the participants must not be revealed when the data is published or with any use of the data after)

Conformity

Social comparison: looking to others in a group to determine how to behave

Informational social influence: looking at how other people act to determine expectations, particularly in ambiguous situations, then acting accordingly

Normative social influence: looking at how other people behave and behaving that way in order to fit in or be accepted

Conformity: Adapting behavior to match others

• Research has been applied in jury situations

Social identity theory*

• Argues that people don’t only have a personal self, they also have many social selves that correspond to group membership

• Salience: when you become highly aware of a group membership, more salient identities are more likely to influence behavior

• Four key mechanisms:

  • Social categorization: classifying people into groups based on similar characteristics, creates in-groups and out-groups (even when people are randomly assigned to a group), enables in-group favoritism

  • Social identification: taking on the norms and characteristics of a group

  • Social comparison: maintaining self-esteem by considering the benefits of belonging to the in-group instead of the out-group, and justifying your membership in the group

  • Positive distinctiveness: being more positive towards anything your in-group represents

• Only describes behavior, doesn’t predict it

• Reductionist when used in isolation (doesn’t address how the environment interacts with the self)

• Can be applied to conformity, juries, emergency situations, sexuality, and football hooliganism

Social cognitive theory*

• Assumes humans learn behavior through observational learning

  • This doesn’t require positive reinforcement, only vicarious reinforcement (watching a model be rewarded or punished for a behavior)

• Four conditions need to be met for social learning:

  • Attention (can be influenced by attractiveness/authority of the model or desirability of the behavior)

  • Retention: remembering the observed behavior

  • Motivation: wanting to repeat the behavior because you understand the potential outcomes (outcome expectancies)

  • Potential: having the physical or mental capability and self-efficacy to imitate a behavior

• Factors that increase the likelihood that an observer will imitate a behavior:

  • Consistency (the model behaves the same way in different situations)

  • The model stands out among other models

  • Identification with the model (i.e. being in their in-group)

  • Liking the model

  • The observer has high self-efficacy (belief in their ability to successfully accomplish a task)

• Can be applied to explain the influence of violence in the media on aggression in children

  • Violent TV can encourage violence, but TV can also be used as a tool for developing learning and social skills, and to introduce positive change in society

• Helps explain why behaviors are passed down within families or cultures

• Explains why children can acquire some behaviors without trial and error learning

• Behaviors can be acquired but not demonstrated until much later, which makes it difficult to establish causality between a model and a behavior

• Doesn’t explain why people don’t learn a behavior even if all the conditions are met

• Most research is experimental and therefore artificial 

• The theory has been applied in many ways, such as health promotion programs and therapy for anxiety

Stereotype

A social perception of an individual in terms of group membership or physical attributes, a generalization made about a group and attributed to members of that group

• Results from schema processing

• Tajfel argues that out-groups are perceived as having similar traits (out-group homogeneity)

Formation of stereotypes

• Schneider (2004) argues that stereotypes can either be developed directly (through personal experience) or indirectly (as a result of culture or society)

• Campbell (1967) says that stereotypes come from personal experiences with groups and gatekeepers (such as the media, parents, and other members of a culture)

  • He argues that stereotypes have some basis in reality, and that they result from an experience with a single individual within a group being generalized to the whole group (grain of truth hypothesis)

• Hamilton and Gifford (1976) argue that stereotypes are the result of illusory correlation (a cognitive bias that involves seeing a relationship between two variables when there is none)

• Confirmation bias (paying attention to behaviors that confirm your beliefs and ignoring all contradictory behaviors) makes established stereotypes difficult to change

• Stereotypes can also result from trying to conform to the views of the in-group about other people

Effects of stereotypes

• Stereotype threat: when people are in situations relevant to a negative stereotype about their in-group and worry about confirming the stereotype

  • Steele and Aronson argue that you don’t need to believe in a stereotype to for it to impact your behavior

  • Stereotype threat can lead to spotlight anxiety, therefore causing pressure that might negatively impact performance (for example, underperforming in school because of stereotype threat)

• Stereotypes can lead to memory distortion (changing memories to reflect stereotypical schema) → Allport & Postman and Martin & Halverson

  • Stereotypes can also influence perception, which has subsequent consequences for memory → Payne

Cultural dimensions*

• Cultural norms are a set of rules based on socially or culturally shared beliefs of how an individual ought to behave to be accepted within that group that regulate behavior

• Surface culture is what is easily seen as different when in contact with another group (food, clothing, music)

• Deep culture is the beliefs, attitudes, and values of a group (perception of time, personal space, respect for authority)

• Dimensions are how the values of a society affect behavior (they describe the trends of behavior in a given culture)

• Hofstede researched cultural dimensions by asking employees of the multinational company IBM to fill in surveys about morale in the workplace, then carrying out factor analysis by focusing on differences in responses between employees from different countries (etic approach, looked at 40 most-represented countries in the surveys)

• Examples of cultural dimensions:

• Power distance: respect for authority/status

• Individualism vs collectivism: the degree to which people are integrated into groups (“I” vs “we” orientation)

• Uncertainty avoidance: tolerance for ambiguity (tolerance for ambiguity means less strict rules and openness to change)

• Masculinity vs femininity: masculine societies focus on achievement, competition, and wealth; feminine societies focus on cooperation, relationships, and quality of life

• Long-term vs short-term orientation: connection to the past and attitude toward the future (short-term orientation means that traditions are kept, long-term orientation has more of a focus on the future)

• Indulgence vs. restraint: enjoying life/having fun vs stricter control through social norms (indulgent cultures believe we are in control of our lives, restrained cultures are more fatalistic)

• Understanding cultural dimensions facilitates intercultural communication

• Individualist societies: loose ties between individuals, everyone is expected to look after themselves and immediate family

• Collectivist societies: at birth people become integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups that provide them with support and protection (if one does not conform to group norms, consequences can sometimes be severe)

• Overapplying cultural dimensions can lead to ecological fallacy (assuming that two members from two different cultures must be different from one another, or that a single member of a culture will always demonstrate the dimensions which are the norm of that culture)

• Cultural dimensions can also lead to the formation of stereotypes and stereotype threat

• Limitations of Hofstede’s research:

  • Only work environments were studied (attitude in work environment may not apply to daily life)

  • Research was done by factor analysis (researcher bias)

  • Research is correlational 

• Strengths of Hofstede’s research:

  • Hoftsede worked with a team for the factor analysis to establish reliability

  • Challenges ethnocentrism

Culture and cognition

• Culture impacts schema formation, and therefore what and how we remember

• The ability to remember is universal, but memory strategies aren’t

• People learn to remember in ways that are relevant to their everyday lives 

• In collectivistic cultures, personal importance and intensity of emotion is less predictive of flashbulb memory formation than in individualistic cultures (focusing on individual experience is often de-emphasized in collectivistic cultures, so there would be less memory rehearsal), but there is no difference when events are of national importance

Enculturation

• Enculturation: the learning and maintenance of the behaviors and norms of our own culture

• Understanding of the values, language, and expectations of a culture is developed through interaction with gatekeepers (e.g. parents, the media, and school) and with peers

• Enculturation is a constant process that reinforces identity as a member of a culture

• Enculturation can influence behavior (musical preference, participation in community rituals, language use, food choice, decisions about how to spend one’s free time) and cognition (attitudes about social relationships, gender roles, time orientation, beliefs about health and illness, beliefs about morality → values enculturation)

• Enculturation can occur through direct tuition, observational learning, and participatory learning

• Gender roles are an example of an enculturated behavior

• Strengths of SCT as an explanation for enculturation:

  • Takes into account the social and cultural context in which enculturation occurs

  • Empirical studies support the idea of learning behavior from models

• Limitations of SCT as an explanation for enculturation:

  • Doesn’t explain considerable variation in the degree to which children conform to a culture’s norms

  • Many variables beyond the modeling of behavior are involved in enculturation

Acculturation*

• Acculturation is the process of cultural and psychological change that takes place as a result of contact between two or more cultural groups (Berry 2004)

• Acculturation strategies: 

  • Assimilation: when an individual abandons their original culture and adopts the cultural behaviors and values of their new culture

  • Integration: when there is an interest in adopting the behaviors and values of the new culture, while still maintaining the original culture

  • Separation: when migrants maintain their own culture and minimize contact with the new culture

  • Marginalization: when it is not really possible to maintain one’s original culture, but because of exclusion or discrimination, it is not possible to assimilate into the new culture

• Acculturative stress (the psychological, somatic, and social difficulties that may accompany acculturation, often resulting in anxiety, depression, and other forms of mental and physical stress) is the result of the tension between enculturation (maintaining one’s cultural identity) and acculturation (changing one’s culture in order to fit in) after moving to a new place

• Acculturation gaps: generational differences in acculturation and the resulting conflict within a family

  • The school systems makes it so that immigrant children have more exposure to the new culture and therefore acculturate faster than their parents, so they face different demands at school and at home

• Cultural minorities sometimes respond to the acculturative stress caused by prejudice and discrimination through reactive identification (strengthening of racial identity in response to discrimination)

  • This can be negative because it contributes to the hardening of oppositional attitudes toward the majority culture, but it can also be positive by causing salience of cultural identity that leads to a sense of empowerment

• The immigrant paradox: “greater” degrees of acculturation are associated with problematic health outcomes

• Strong acculturation research is bidirectional (looking at both host and heritage culture), not unidirectional

• Methodological considerations for studying acculturation:

  • Language barriers (understanding and interpretation of questions)

  • Psychologists make assumptions about what healthy acculturation looks like

  • Many variables influence the experience of migrants in a new culture (age of migration, length of residency, education, sexual orientation, religion, class, and trauma experienced prior to arrival in the new culture) → difficult to find representative samples 

  • Studies of this nature generally have high attrition rates and low participation rates

  • Ethical considerations of informed consent, right to withdraw and anonymity (especially for illegal or undocumented immigrants)

• Spiraling causality: stress of acculturation initially reduces physical health but mental health improves → eventually physical health improves too