The new research agenda for a cultural psychology.

Abstract

Abstract Qualitative methods are the investigative tools of choice for the field of cultural psychology, in which the study of meaning is central. The process of cultural psychological research calls for an approach that emphasizes the quality of the relationship between researchers and participants. We argue for the importance of this relationship in the development of the validity and usefulness of such work. Methods within this framework often include dialectic communication, respect, participatory partnership, inductive reasoning, and the taking of extra time as necessary. In this paper, research projects with urban Canadian street youth, Inuit prison inmates, and Inuit community members experiencing a youth suicide epidemic are provided as case studies that highlight the relational motif in qualitative research. The field of cultural psychology, alive in various forms for quite some time, has been burgeoning since about 1990 (Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1990; Stigler, Shweder, & Herdt, 1990). Cultural psychology is a multi- and interdisciplinary crossing but primarily involves the epistemological middle ground between psychology and anthropology. Some of its roots stem from the earlier work of Luria (1976), Mead (1934), and Vygotsky (1962). Arising also from the growing subdisciplines of psychological (e.g., Bock, 1994, 1999; Shore, 1996; Shweder & LeVine, 1984) and cognitive (e.g., D'Andrade, 1995; Hutchins, 1996; Strauss & Quinn, 1997) anthropology, cultural psychology has developed out of a dissatisfaction with psychology's psychic unity or universalist model of the mind (Shweder, 1990), cross-cultural psychology's treatment model of culture as an independent variable rather than as a process (Greenfield, 1997), and psychology's self-limiting ethnocentric logic (Seeley, in press). Cultural psychology includes or overlaps with a number of fields of investigation within psychology, including situated cognition (Kirshner & Whitson, 1997), social and shared cognition (Nye & Brower, 1996; Resnick, Levine, & Teasley, 1991), and intentionality (Rosen, 1995). Its focus is on the understanding of not only how mind constitutes culture but more importantly of how culture constitutes mind. Cultural psychology examines the process of the social or cultural construction of the person including thoughts, emotions, motivation, development, identity, and other psychological constructs. Culture in cultural psychology encompasses identities, meanings, experiences, and practices, and is usually conceptualized, in the Kroeber-- Kluckhohn sense, as collective symbolic discourse (Kuper, 1999, p. 16). In keeping with the more recent trend in anthropology, culture goes beyond reference to traditional exoticism and moves, both in focus and definition, to the inclusion of less distant others within the same landscape, and may encompass beliefs, traditions, and ideologies with respect to such categories as age cohort, gender, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, and even workplace (Aug&, 1994; Kuper, 1999). At the centre of cultural psychology is the study of meaning. It leans on the hermeneutic or interpretive side of psychology. Thus, of utmost importance is the understanding of meaning from the participant's (native's) point of view. Bruner (1990) writes that cultural psychology also seeks out the rules that human beings bring to bear in creating meanings in cultural contexts. These contexts are always contexts of practice. It is always necessary to ask what people are doing or trying to do in that context (p. 118). Qualitative research methods, through a process that can be both inductive and deductive, allow for the understanding of such rules people have for making sense of their worlds specific to various domains of enquiry. We agree with Ratner (1997) that [t]he task of inferring mental activity from extensive expressions is the central and distinguishing concern of qualitative methodology (p. …