Broadening Our View of Culture

Abstract

For decades, culture in psychology has been virtually synonymous with ethnicity and nationality. While many advances have been made, a full understanding of culture requires expanding our focus to other forms of culture, including social class, region of origin, religion, profession, gender, political culture, and many others. The proposed work will broaden our understanding of culture via a rigorous, multi-method set of studies, including focus groups, quantitative surveys, and a longitudinal study using ecological momentary assessment techniques, with which we will predict successful adaptation. We will also elucidate the role that cultural memories play in constituting cultural identities. To take maximum advantage of our techniques, we will use the most cutting edge methodological and quantitative approaches to research design and data analysis, including hierarchical linear modeling and full information maximum likelihood estimation to account for attrition and missing data. We will also ensure the measurement invariance of scales before making claims about cultural variation across groups. We have assembled a top notch, interdisciplinary team, representing social and cultural, developmental, cognitive, and quantitative psychology, led by principal investigator Adam Cohen, who has forcefully argued for the expansion of psychologyÕs views of culture. This work will be important in terms of application potential because US military and strategic interests require a full understanding of what culture is, how various cultures affect our goals and behaviors, how various cultural identities change over time, why cultural identities vary in importance over time, and how such variation predicts adaptation.

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Oct 15, 2018
Source ID
W911NF1710175

Entities

People

  • Adam Cohen

Organizations

  • Arizona State University
  • Army Contracting Command
  • United States Army

Tags

Readers

  • Educational Psychology
  • Organizational Psychology.
  • Systems Analysis and Design