Applied Cross-Cultural Psychology and the Developing World
Titel:
Applied Cross-Cultural Psychology and the Developing World
Auteur:
Sinha, Durganand
Verschenen in:
International journal of psychology
Paginering:
Jaargang 25 (1990) nr. 2 pagina's 381-386
Jaar:
1990
Inhoud:
In most developing countries, academic pursuit is expected to have some positive outcome. The expectation is legitimate. Being a re-searcher is to be considered a privilege. With such paucity of resources and urgency about eradication of poverty, meeting the needs of the hungry and the destitute, any fund allocated for scientific research implies diverting the scarce resources to less urgent areas. Doing research is, therefore, not so much of a pastime, as it sometimes tends to become in more affluent societies, but an activity from which the community legitimately expects some tangible return. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that research in psychology in India and in most developing countries is trying to become largely problem-oriented and applied. Moreover, application is restricted not merely to individualbased problems like adjustment, delinquency, drug-addiction and so on by using behaviour therapy and other techniques, or applications of psychological principles towards enhancing the efficient working of relatively stable micro-level institutions like the schools and work organizations, but is concerned with larger social issues like eradication of poverty and inequality with the express purpose of enhancing the general well-being of the community. As it has been rightly observed by Sinha (1983a) and reiterated recently by Connolly (1985: 251), in the Third World countries, 'one of the psychologist's objectives, therefore, must be to understand the factors which facilitate social change and those which impede it'. Has cross-cultural psychology measured up to this task? Has it provided us with general rules that can have bearing upon a particular case? The answer is a firm negative. Bulk of crosscultural psychologists including those from the Third World, have seldom addressed themselves to these problems or bothered about policy implications of their research findings and action programmes for providing optimal human development. The fact became patently clear to some of us engaged in consultations sponsored by the WHO on the applications of cross-cultural psychology to promoting healthy human development some seven years back, the outcome of which has been the recent publication Health and Cross-Cultural Psychology: Towarcis Applications (Dasen et al. 1988). The limitation of the discipline came out very sharply. After the first 'consultation' when we had all prepared the first draft of our papers on specific themes, each one of us was asked to prepare a tabular presentation of 'facts' contained in the paper, each being rated according to: (i) its contribution to general knowledge without specific possibility of application; (ii) conducive to being 'translated' into behavioural or other interventions; and (iii) already applicable. What surprised us was that most of the 'facts' were put into the first category and hardly any got categorised as 'already applicable'.
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