Toward greater cultural sensitivity in developmental psychology

Abstract

With the increased attention given to culture in recent years in developmental psychology, there remains a need to overcome limitations of certain existing approaches. Such limitations include tendencies to adopt approaches to culture that are overly global, ignore its symbolic aspects, and that reduce culture to an individual difference variable that can be assessed by conventional psychological scale measures. In the present article, we focus on theoretical and methodological challenges involved in conceptualizing and measuring culture. In the first section, we discuss theoretical work on culture, including how to define culture and considerations to take into account when operationalizing culture, such as attending to its symbolic aspects, its embodiment in everyday social practices, and its dynamic nature. In the second section, we describe the theoretical and methodological approaches that we have adopted in incorporating culture in our own cross-cultural developmental research. Finally, in conclusion, we identify key challenges that arise in integrating attention to culture with psychological work in neuroscience, making the case for the continued importance of attention to culture even with the move toward neurologically based accounts of developmental processes.