Self-construal in Context: A Response to Walker, Deng, and Dieser

Abstract

The article by Walker, Deng, & Dieser stimulates questions and raises many good points to consider as leisure research evolves. Their article resonated with many of my own thoughts and challenges as I have been engaged in international research. Walker et al. articulate a need to develop a viable theoretical framework, which includes intervening variables, to explore differences and similarities in leisure from a framework that includes culture, race, and ethnicity. They propose a new-to-leisure construct self-construal be incorporated into leisure theory, broadly conceptualized. In this construction of theory, they propose that self-construal is influenced by culture, and predictive of cognition, emotion, and motivation. As a final piece to their paper, they discuss self-construal as it might relate to practical issues such as benefits based programming.After reading and mulling over the article, several thoughts based on my own research and understanding of the concepts described by Walker et al arose. I then tested these thoughts against a brief literature review (a literature new to me except for the self-determination literature). This included reading some of Oyserman's work, whom Walker et al. rely on for part of their discussion. I left this process by applauding Walker et al. for raising some important issues, but also saying, Whoa! This is far too complex to wholeheartedly endorse as the next defining moment of leisure research and practice. The final step in constructing this response was to ask my colleague Garry Chick, whose disciplinary background is cultural anthropology, to review my thoughts. His advice and input was invaluable and greatly appreciated. Although Walker et al.'s article prompted many thoughts, I will confine my remarks here to discussing the constructs of self-construal and self-determination in relationship to culture.By way of background to understand my perceptions, over the past four years I have had the privileged opportunity to engage in international research on adolescent leisure and health with colleagues from Australia, Chile, Columbia, (former east) Germany, South Africa, and Togo1, and I am engaged in preliminary discussions with a colleagues in Czech Republic and Maylasia. Some of these countries are considered more collectivist than others, with Togo probably being the most collective (judging from a personal, not empirical, perspective). One of the interesting things to consider in our work in eastern Germany has been the course toward individualism caused by German reunification.The work in Australia, Columbia, Germany, and South Africa (and possibly the Czech Republic and Malaysia) essentially is to culturally adapt, implement, and evaluate leisure and health curricula that were developed by U.S. researchers (of which I am one). Over the course of these research projects (most of which are on-going) I have been plagued with doubts about the transportability of constructs, methods, and curricula based on Western theory across cultural conditions. I must admit that although my concerns have been valid, in reality they have been quite insignificant compared to the robustness of the theoretical framework that informs our work. This is only partly evidenced by the fact that in each country, our research team was invited to share what we were doing and work with in-country colleagues (and other stakeholders) to make cultural adaptations. These experiences have shaped the way I viewed Walker et al.'s article.Devilish DualismIt would have helped me understand their perspective if Walker et al. had defined what they meant by culture and to clarify if their interest was on cross-national or cross-cultural studies, or both, and why. Culture can be defined in a number of ways and some discussion of why and how culture was perceived as a topic would have aided in understanding why self-construal is important.I was initially confused by what self-construal was. …