Title: Cross-Cultural Psychology: History, Theories, Methods - IResearchNet
Headings: Cross-Cultural Psychology
Cross-Cultural Psychology
Cross-Cultural Psychology Definition
Cross-Cultural Psychology Theories and Methods of Study
Goals of the Study of Cultural Factors in Cross-Cultural Psychology
Methodological Issues in Cross-Cultural Psychology
Multilingual Studies in Cross-Cultural Psychology
Individual and Country-Level Studies in Cross-Cultural Psychology
Cross-Cultural Psychology References:

Content: The first is cultural psychology, a relatively young subdiscipline. It is closely related to social constructionism and aims at an in-depth understanding of psychological functioning by studying in situ behavior, usually in only one culture. Culture and personality are taken to constitute each other in a process of mutual influences. Culture is seen as a system of meanings, with studies often focusing on how individuals gradually acquire the perspective of a culture. In line with common practice in anthropology (ethnography in particular), assessment methods are utilized that impose little or no a priori categorization on the data, such as unstructured interviews and tape and video recordings. Because of the interest in learning processes, diachronic (longitudinal) designs are often employed. Indigenous psychologies provide another example of an increasingly popular, noncomparative approach to understanding cultural variation. It is a generic name for all types of psychologies that attempt to overcome the limitations of, in Sinha’s words, “the culture-bound and culture-blind tendencies of mainstream psychology” (1997). Indigenous psychologies have been developed in various areas, such as Latin America, India, Japan, and China. The need for developing an indigenous psychology is often triggered by findings that a non-Western application of a common Western theory or instrument does not do justice to the specifics of the non-Western group.