What are the THREE components to the definition of ‘culture’, according to Cohen (2009) and our extensive discussion in lecture? Do these help you to more fully grasp/identify cultural groups? Cohen considers three kinds of cultures religion, socioeconomic status, and region within a country.
Cohen believes that to be considered as a culture it must possess the following, ‘Culture emerges in adaptive interactions between humans and environments Second, culture consists of shared elements. Third, culture is transmitted across time periods and generations (Cohen, 2009)’. His concept of culture allowed me to better identify culture groups placing culture groups into categories shared attitudes, beliefs, norms, role definitions, and values.
Before I was grouping together one’s culture by the country and language they spoke. Cohen Help me to clarify that a person can come from the same country speak the same language but have very different values, beliefs, norms and do not identify themselves with their countries traditions.
One theme of this course is that we are ‘multicultural’ individuals. How can this be so? EXPLAIN this idea based on your own experiences. I believe that we are all multicultural because of the society we live in.
We as individuals come into contact with a variety of people that we can relate to. We integrate ideas, beliefs from many different countries and cultural backgrounds in our day to day life most people work, go to school are attend a community event that enmeshes different cultural backgrounds.
We also participate in different events, value different things, different beliefs, and different norms that do not always fit into one category, for instance, I am an African American gay Cristian female with nontraditional beliefs which allows me to identify with certain aspect of each group shaping my beliefs values and ideas making me multicultural.
According to your text’s authors, ‘pop’ culture does not count as culture proper. They cite two different reasons, OTHER than the trendiness aspect of pop culture, as to why they come to this conclusion. Name and describe ONE of their arguments or rationales. According to the book, popular culture does not involve sharing a wide range of psychological attributes across various psychological domains.
The book in chapter 1 defines culture as a system of rules that cut across attitudes, values, opinions, beliefs, norms, and behaviors but popular culture may share values and expression but is not a way of life. Popular culture values and expressions come and go, trends also change over the years but in order to consider culture it has to be stable over time in from generation to generation.
In cross-cultural research on the Big Five personality inventory, which specific behavior at the item-level (remember there were 240 items!) was singled out as specifically problematic and ‘lost-in-translation’? Lost in translation was,’ Item 17, ‘I have a leisurely style in work and play’ reversed, was the exception, in some cultures it was a good indicator of Extraversion, but in most it appeared to assess Introversion which leads to a loss in translation ( McCrae & Terracciano, 2005)’. For different cultures, the meaning of leisure brought about different ideas one culture may think about fun activities where another might thank of chores.
How did the McCrae et. al (2005) study of ‘The Big Five’ ensure ‘procedural and linguistic equivalence? Reflect on this process – suppose you were conducting a cross-cultural study. How would you go about ensuring these equivalences? They recruited collaborators from a wide range of cultures. They required that potential participants be fluent in a language for which an authorized NEO-PI-R translation was available. They required wanted participants who had previously used the NEO-PI-R or who had participated in another multinational study.
They searching the Internet to help increase representation and find participants from African and Arabic cultures. They also used PsycINFO for personality psychologists from those areas to help strengthen their research and broaden their reach for participates. They gathered from over 50 cultures who were represented from six different continents they were able to do this by translating their survey into different languages. I would follow McCrae’s methods which seems like a good way to have all cultures represented.
I feel as if you are not getting a true presentation if the information you are giving out is not understood and does not have the same translations from culture to culture. I feel like McCrae did an excellent job making sure different cultures were represented and had the same understanding of his questions. I would fall his steps.
Why did the McCrae et. al (2005) researchers ask their participants to rate somebody else rather than themselves? Explain the reasoning behind this design decision and whether you think it rings true (that is, that the concern is valid). McCrae asked participants to rate others because he was conditioning his participants.
McCrae felt like he could get more truthful answers if participants felt that he thought their surveys were about someone else and they wouldn’t feel so judged. I think that it is a great idea because people do not like to be judge and if they think that you think it’s someone else they’re talking about then you will most likely get honest answers.
