PSYCH 620 Week 1 Culture and Cross-Cultural Research Example

Can One Well-Being Survey Serve Somali, Congolese and Afghan Clients? Culture, WEIRD Samples and Measurement Equivalence

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/620: Multicultural and Social Issues in Psychology

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The resettlement agency, its program and clients are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Culture shapes how people think, feel and act, and it shapes how they answer research questions. Psychology has often assumed that findings from one population apply everywhere. This paper examines that assumption through a decision at my workplace: choosing a survey to measure the well-being of refugee clients from very different backgrounds.

The Decision

I coordinate the employment and wellness program at a refugee resettlement agency in Phoenix, Arizona. Our clients include families from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan, as well as smaller numbers from other countries. A new federal grant requires us to report changes in client well-being every six months. A consultant proposed a twenty-item well-being survey widely used in the United States, translated into Somali, Swahili and Dari. Before agreeing, I wanted to know whether the survey would measure the same thing in all three groups.

What Is Culture?

Culture refers to shared meanings, practices, values and institutions that people learn as members of groups and pass on across generations. It is not the same as nationality or ethnicity: Somali clients who grew up in Mogadishu, in a Kenyan refugee camp or in Minneapolis may share a heritage but differ in many cultural experiences. Culture is also dynamic, changing with migration, technology and contact with other groups. Treating any culture as fixed or uniform invites stereotypes.

Psychology's Narrow Samples

Henrich et al. (2010) gathered comparisons on topics ranging from optical illusions and fairness games to spatial memory and self-description. Again and again, the Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic samples that dominate psychology, nicknamed WEIRD, landed at an extreme of the human spread instead of near its center. Yet these populations, especially American undergraduates, supplied most of the participants in psychological research. The authors concluded that researchers should not assume their findings were universal without testing them in other populations.

Arnett (2008) documented the imbalance directly by examining six leading American Psychological Association journals over several years. About sixty-eight percent of participants came from the United States and about ninety-six percent from Western industrialized countries, which together contain about twelve percent of the world's population. Arnett argued that this narrow base limited psychology's ability to describe human behavior and called for research on the neglected majority of humanity.

The well-being survey proposed for our agency was developed and validated with American college students and adults. Its evidence base is therefore exactly the kind these critiques warn about.

Independent and Interdependent Selves

Markus and Kitayama (1991) argued that the very idea of a self is built differently from one culture to the next. In the independent version, typical of the United States and much of Western Europe, a person is defined by inner qualities that set them apart, and a good life means voicing one's own views and chasing one's own aims. An interdependent self-construal, more common in many Asian, African and Latin American contexts, defines the self through relationships and roles and emphasizes fitting in and fulfilling obligations. These construals shape cognition, emotion and motivation, including what makes people feel good.

Several items on the proposed survey reflect an independent view, such as "I am achieving most of my personal goals" and "I make my own decisions." For a Congolese mother whose sense of well-being rests on her children's safety and her standing among relatives, or an Afghan father whose role is defined by providing for an extended family, such items may not capture well-being as they experience it. The survey also lacks items about family, faith and community, which our clients frequently mention when describing a good life.

A survey can be translated perfectly and still ask the wrong questions.

Bias and Equivalence

A widely used overview of cross-cultural assessment sorted bias into three kinds (van de Vijver & Tanzer, 2004). Construct bias occurs when the concept itself differs across cultures, as when well-being includes different elements. Method bias arises from features of administration, such as unfamiliarity with rating scales, differences in response styles or the presence of an interviewer. Item bias, also called differential item functioning, occurs when specific items work differently across groups because of poor translation or culturally specific content. The overview also described levels of equivalence, from whether the same construct is measured to whether scores can be compared directly, and procedures to detect and reduce bias.

Each type of bias is plausible here. Construct bias may arise because well-being is more relational for many clients. Method bias may arise because some clients, especially older adults with limited schooling, have little experience with five-point agreement scales, and because answers given to an agency staff member may be shaped by gratitude or worry about services. Item bias may arise from translation: a Somali community member reviewing the draft noted that the word chosen for "satisfied" suggested resignation rather than contentment.

Etic and Emic Approaches

Cross-cultural researchers distinguish etic approaches, which apply a common framework across cultures, from emic approaches, which describe concepts from within a culture. A purely etic approach would administer the American survey everywhere. A purely emic approach would develop separate measures for each group, making comparison impossible. A combined approach starts with concepts that matter within each community and then tests whether a shared measure captures them.

What Is at Stake for Clients

Measurement choices have consequences beyond the grant report. If the survey underestimates well-being among Afghan clients because its items miss what matters to them, the agency might conclude that its services fail that community and shift resources elsewhere. If Somali clients answer politely positive out of gratitude, real distress could go unnoticed and referrals to mental health care might not happen. Funders may also compare our results with those of agencies serving different populations, drawing conclusions that the data cannot support. A measure that works unevenly across groups can therefore produce unfair decisions about real people, which is why equivalence is an ethical question as well as a technical one.

Recommendations

I recommended four steps before adopting a survey. First, hold short focus groups with clients from each community to ask what a good life looks like after resettlement and compare their answers with the survey's items. Second, add or adapt items about family, faith and community where focus groups show they matter. Third, have one translator render the revised survey into each language, a second translator turn it back into English without seeing the original and a panel of bilingual clients settle the differences; then sit with a few clients from each group and ask them to say aloud what each question meant to them. Fourth, once enough data are collected, test whether items function similarly across groups before comparing scores between communities. In the meantime, we will report changes within each group over time rather than comparing groups.

Limits

Our agency is not a research center, and full equivalence testing requires larger samples than any one group may provide in a year. Partnering with a university or a network of resettlement agencies could make this possible.

Conclusion

Psychology's reliance on narrow samples means that many measures carry assumptions that may not hold across cultures. Theories of the self and methods for detecting bias show how a well-being survey could misrepresent refugee clients and how careful adaptation and testing can make measurement fairer. Culture is not a footnote to research; it shapes what is measured and what the numbers mean.

References

Arnett, J. J. (2008). The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less American. American Psychologist, 63(7), 602-614. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.63.7.602

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224-253. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224

van de Vijver, F., & Tanzer, N. K. (2004). Bias and equivalence in cross-cultural assessment: An overview. European Review of Applied Psychology, 54(2), 119-135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erap.2003.12.004