Why I study...relationships and culture
Psychology offers us many interesting topics for study, but few
capture the public imagination more than the study of close
relationships. Our political leaders constantly refer to the importance
of ‘the family’, the health implications of greater openness in sexual
relations, the need for stronger community relations, and so on.
Perhaps surprisingly then, few British psychologists have conducted
systematic, scientific investigations on close relationships, with the
majority of relationships research taking place in the US.
Unfortunately, as is the case in many other areas of psychology, the
result is that we know a great deal about North American sophomores but
precious little about cultural diversity in relationships, even within
multicultural Western societies. I believe that this has a number of
important implications, which promptedme to focus much of my research on relationships across cultures.
First, there are intriguing differences in the way that people think
and feel about relationships across the globe, and many misconceptions
about these differences. In some cultures, being married makes you far
happier than in others (Goodwin, 1999). In many societies, a lack of
close friendships has severe consequences for psychological well-being,
in others it is less significant (van Tilburg et al., 1998). And
although humans just about everywhere fall in love and have similar
intense, highly emotional feelings about the person they love, the role
of these feelings in actually forming a relationship with the admired
other may be heavily dependent on the extent to which important others
regulate relationship formation in that society. As a result, in some
societies, individual attraction may play only a small part in actual
marital choice. Here we have just one example of a phenomenon familiar
to cross-cultural psychologists: the relationship between what
individuals feel (or indeed think) and the way they behave is likely to
moderated by culture. Relationship formation then serves as just one
example of some fairly important principles about predicting behaviour
in different settings.
Second, we are all often addressed in the media by ‘respectable’
pundits pontificating about the impacts of globalisation, its
implications for the decline in social networks, interpersonal trust,
intergenerational respect and the like. Unfortunately, these pundits
usually base their proclamations on very little evidence. Studying
relationships across various cultures can often give us important
insights into the mechanisms and consequences of social change within
cultures, one of the major themes of the social sciences but one rarely
investigated by psychologists.
In China, for example, the role children have in the family has
see-sawed from a position of relatively little influence
(pre-revolutionary China) to a situation where the authority of elders
was severely challenged (during the Cultural Revolution), to modern-day
China under the one-child policy, where sons in particular are often
treated as ‘pampered Emperors’. I completed my doctorate in 1989, a
time of great social change in Central and Eastern Europe, and for the
past 14 years I have been fortunate to collaborate with colleagues
across this region on projects investigating the implications of these
changes for relationship intimacy and quality, trust, gender roles,
intergenerational relations, social networks and sexual behaviour. We
also worked in Hong Kong immediately leading up to the handover to
China, investigating the implications of anxiety over the handover on
the desire to have children.
Our results have shown that as ‘large events’ unfold within a society
there are manifold implications for the everyday lives of individuals
in these countries (Goodwin et al., 2002). For example, we find that
for some groups in some countries these social changes offer important
opportunities for the development of psychologically important new
networks, whilst for others (often the poorer and less skilled segments
of society) these changes can lead to the collapse of developed
interpersonal ties, often with devastating implications (e.g. the sharp
increase in alcoholism amongst Russian men during in the early 1990s,
and the subsequent dramatic decrease in their life expectancy). Often
these results are culture-specific and depend on long-established
relational histories: in the Georgian Republic, for example, long hours
at work were compensated for by the richness of workplace interactions,
leading to high levels of psychological well-being amongst our Georgian
respondents. In Russia a lack of such social integration meant that the
same work hours helped contribute to high levels of depression.
Frequently too, culture, group membership and personality combined to
predict relationships outcomes; more formally, there were interactions
between micro, meso and macro levels of variables. Everywhere, however,
we found that close relationships acted as an important ‘social glue’,
helping people deal with the uncertainties of their changing world, and
that a culturally sensitive understanding
of these interpersonal dynamics could be as crucial to successful
societal transformations as the implementation of specific economic
reforms.
This suggests that, finally, understanding relationships and culture
can have considerable practical implications. In some societies, for
example, domestic abuse is very rare, and by studying such societies we
can try to understand how to reduce abuse in our own culture. By
understanding how culture may moderate an established relationship
between variables (e.g. between personality and sexual risk taking) we
can design better, more closely targeted interventions, more likely to
work with particular cultural groups. Understanding cultural variations
in relationship stability can help us design appropriate support
services for particular communities, whilst comprehending some of the
key issues in mixed ethnicity relations can be vital in promoting
better integration within a multicultural Britain. All of these
underline the value of relationship psychology as a very applied
science.
Personal relationships are, of course, of interest to most people and a
wonderful topic to research down the pub. Studying relationships across
cultures is, however, more than just a great excuse for visiting pubs
overseas: it has serious theoretical
and practical benefits. Culture and ethnicity have too often been seen
as at best co-variates in psychology, ‘messy’ variables to be
‘controlled out’ in experimental designs. I believe it is time for
culture and cultural change to take a much more central role within
British psychology, prompting us to question many of our assumptions
about the universality and stability of our ‘established’ findings.
– Professor Robin Goodwin is in the School of Social Sciences and Law
at Brunel University, London. E-mail: [email protected].
Weblinks
Robin Goodwin’s personal page: tinyurl.com/d6yqs
International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology: www.iaccp.org
International Association for Relationships Research: www.iarr.org
References
Goodwin, R. (1999). Personal relationships across cultures. London: Routledge.
Goodwin, R., Nizharadze, G., Nguyen Luu, L.A., Kosa, E. &
Emelyanova, T. (2002). Social support in a changing Europe. European
Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 379–393.
van Tilburg, T., de Jong Gierveld, J., Lecchini, L. & Marsiglia, D.
(1998). Social Integration and loneliness: A comparative study among
older adults in the Netherlands and Tuscany. Journal of Social and
Personal Relationships, 15, 740–754.
(Please note that some pictures may have been removed for copyright reasons)
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