In search of autonomous-relational self-construal

Abstract

I first met Cigdem Kagitcibasi in the late 1980s, when I became interested in cross-cultural approaches to social and organizational psychology and started to attend the congresses of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. I developed an increasing respect for the contributions that she was making, both to psychology in Turkey and to discussions of how best cross-cultural psychology might progress. A series of her former students came to work with me in the UK, and on visits to Turkey, I marveled at the way that she seemed to be a moving force behind so many positive initiatives. More recently, I came to realize that the outcome of her research into families could provide a vital missing link within existing accounts of cross-cultural social psychology such as those provided by myself and Michael Bond (Smith and Bond 1993). Consequently, I was delighted when she was able to join us in generating a completely new version of our earlier book (Smith et al. 2006). I became convinced that her distinctive conceptualization of self had captured an element less well seen or articulated by others. This chapter documents my attempts to build bridges between her insight and the concepts and measures that have been devised by other contributors to the field. Over the past few decades, psychologists have formulated increasingly sophisticated models of the ways in which persons regulate their behavior.