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In response to concerns about the subsuming of individuals under essential general psychiatric diagnostic categories, there have been calls for an idiographic component in person specific diagnostic formulations. The distinction between the idiographic and nomothetic was introduced by Windelband as his contribution to the Methodenstreit. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is unclear what the distinction is supposed to comprise. In this chapter, I attempt to shed light on the motivation for the distinction by looking at a number of recent approaches to healthcare that share a concern with a focus on individuals. Despite this shared element in their motivation, I argue that none help to articulate the nature of the idiographic itself. This chapter broadens the central claim of my chapter in the 2019 Yearbook of Idiographic Science, here drawing on a clue from Windelband’s student Rickert to argue that there is a role for the idiographic in healthcare though not as a form of judgement, understanding or intelligibility but rather a specific singular interest in an individual. It is this that also underpins developments in healthcare related to the individual or person.

In response to concerns about the subsuming of individuals under essential general psychiatric diagnostic categories, there have been calls for an idiographic component in person specific diagnostic formulations. The distinction between the idiographic and nomothetic was introduced by Windelband as his contribution to the Methodenstreit. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is unclear what the distinction is supposed to comprise. In this chapter, I attempt to shed light on the motivation for the distinction by looking at a number of recent approaches to healthcare that share a concern with a focus on individuals. Despite this shared element in their motivation, I argue that none help to articulate the nature of the idiographic itself. This chapter broadens the central claim of my chapter in the 2019 Yearbook of Idiographic Science, here drawing on a clue from Windelband’s student Rickert to argue that there is a role for the idiographic in healthcare though not as a form of judgement, understanding or intelligibility but rather a specific singular interest in an individual. It is this that also underpins developments in healthcare related to the individual or person.

One facet of contemporary societies is their increasingly divers composition. With a foreign population percentage of 47, 5 %, Luxembourg is an example for a super-diverse society and provides a rich context to explore acculturation processes. The majority of immigrants have European roots, but the number of non-European immigrants is rising. Within this qualitative study we examined the identity construction processes of eight Japanese women living in Luxembourg using several visual primes guiding the interview. Building on Ying-yi Hong’s work on cultural mixing we developed hybrid images to evoke affective responses and to capture the negotiation processes between cultures. The choice of images was carefully prepared and first involved an ethnographic study of cultural dimensions of Japan and Luxembourg. Based on this analysis we decided to explore the domains of beauty, food, living, leisure and family. For each domain, we chose a prototypical European and Japanese image and created a hybrid image. All images were culturally meaningful and anchored in real life experiences. The Japanese images were tested in a pilot study in Japan. The interviews were carefully planned, each phase involving different visual stimuli. In the opening phase, the interviewer presented a business card in three different designs – European, Japanese and a mixed version. Interviewees could choose their preferred version and explain their choice. Next, a series of 15 matched typical images of Japan and Luxembourg were shown and the interviewees again chose their preferred images and explained their choice. Finally, the five sets of domain-specific images were presented. These provided a context for narration and especially the reaction to the hybrid stimuli showed how participants negotiate their cultural identities. The visual primes made the negotiation strategies visible. Findings from this study and the potential of this culture-sensitive method for accessing the process of acculturat

Ambivalence is a deeply ambiguous concept. Contributions to the present book, viewed all together, exemplify that verdict, as they are situated in the intellectual space among theory, phenomena, research practices, and basic assumptions about the world...

Care for elderly persons is multifaceted and embedded in a rich socio-ecological context of individual, micro-, and macro-social factors. This complexity requires multidisciplinary perspectives to better understand phenomena of elder care and to act successfully in this field. In the final chapter of a multidisciplinary book with contributions from geropsychology, other gerosciences, and cultural psychology the editors draw conclusions about major topics, new insights, and further implications for research and practice. The conclusions refer to four domains. First, the macro-social context—including demographic, historical, political, normative, and other cultural factors—opens and limits the available options for individual care giving and receipt and shapes how these issues are experienced by the participants. Second, elder care at the individual and family level is far more complex than previously thought, due to differentiated individual and social care preferences and due to consequences extending beyond single caregivers to multigenerational caring families. Third, processes involved in formal and informal care turned out to be rather differentiated: Understanding, emotional responding, motivation and acting towards suffering, care dependency and caregiver burden are influenced by multiple individual and social level factors. Fourth, future issues of elder care are shaped by macro level factors such as population aging, social trends in job and family life, and technological developments with implications for ensuring care quality, care staff, culturally sensitive care, and assistive technologies. Cultural psychology emerged as a valuable partner of the gerosciences by contributing essentially to a deeper understanding of the aforementioned issues.

In the introduction of a multidisciplinary book on the role of culture in elder care the editors set the stage for a substantive integration of contributions from geropsychology, other gerosciences, and cultural psychology. The authors present arguments for a life-span developmental perspective on care for the elderly and extend this to geropsychology as subsection of life-span developmental psychology. They further emphasize that these disciplines consider to some extent the role of cultural and other contextual factors and that other gerosciences specialized on historical, political, health-and nursing-related aspects of elder care can further supplement this effort. Then three major streams of cultural psychology are mentioned which are particularly relevant to topics of caring: Dialogical Self Theory, Theory of Social Representations, and Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics. The authors conclude that an increasing population aging and growing gaps between demand and supply of care create a serious practical need for an integration of geropsychology, other gerosciences, and cultural psychologies to achieve a better understanding of the individual, interpersonal, and macro social processes involved in elder care.

This chapter is the introduction of the editors to the volume Trans-generational Relations: Investigating Ambivalences. An introduction to the concept of ambivalence is given as well as a summary of the chapters of the book.

The present volume deals with the experience of ambivalence in family relations - a well-known phenomenon that has inspired more and more research and theorizing in the last years but that is however sometimes difficult to capture. Bringing together junior and senior researchers from different parts of the world, ideas on theory and research are elaborated following qualitative and quantitative approaches. This book thus contributes to theory-building as well as outlining research results and helping to develop measurement in interpersonal and intergenerational relations.

Investigations of children’s development as persons are conspicuous by their absence in developmental psychology. Building on central concepts in the work of William Stern and James Mark Baldwin, such as experience, tensions, convergence, persistent imitation and sembling, we propose to draw a basic frame for such an investigation. The empirical investigation concerns five 13-year-old children and their experience of their life-worlds and –time, and their experience of developing as persons. Based on an empirical analysis we extend the perspective of Stern and Baldwin to include a broader conceptualization of the collective level involved in the construction of the persons’ cultural life courses. By doing so, we wish to emphasize that the development of a person only maintains a status of being personal if the conceptualization takes into account the simultaneous and complementary processes which operate to cultivate the life courses – generating a ground from where they can be lived and transformed in personally meaningful ways.

A terminal state illness implies that the patient is dying—but death is an uncertainty that we all have to deal with. Using interpretative description from an Idiographic Science perspective, this investigation attempted to comprehend one Italian anesthesiologist’s sensemaking of life and death, by means of describing and interpreting: (a) her I-positions concerning medical practice in palliative care; (b) her sensemaking towards death-related experiences and expectations; and (c) the dialogic interaction of both health professionals, one interviewee (anesthesiologist) and the interviewer (researcher),when talking about death. We find that different I-positions of the anesthesiologist in relating with patients are related to life threatening experiences. in the biography of the physician and their similarity to the patient’s condition. But also different I-positions of the researcher cope with the tension of talking about taboo topics linked to death, such as unhealthy conducts and life-threatening illnesses. Furthermore, findings give an account of contextual factors, such as the palliative teamwork or the compilation of electronic medical records that interfere with the rapport established during the palliative care practice.

Instructors - Electronic inspection copies are available or contact your local sales representative for an inspection copy of the print version. An Invitation to Cultural Psychology looks at the everyday life worlds of human beings through the lens of a new synthetic perspective in cultural psychology – that of semiotic dynamics. Based on historical work from many different fields in the social and behavioural sciences, and the humanities too, this perspective applied to cultural psychology suggests that human beings are constantly creating, maintaining and abandoning hierarchies of meanings within all cultural contexts they experience. It’s a perspective that leans heavily on the work of the great French philosopher, Henri Bergson, only now being realised as a core basis for human cultural living. Jaan Valsiner is the founding editor of the major journal in the field, Culture & Psychology, and Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. He is the first Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University in Denmark, where he leads Europe's first Research Centre on Cultural Psychology.

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This major new textbook by Jaan Valsiner focuses on the interface between cultural psychology and developmental psychology. Intended for students from undergraduate level upwards, the book provides a wide-ranging overview of the cultural perspective on human development, with illustrations from pre-natal development to adulthood.A key feature is the broad coverage of theoretical and methodological issues which have relevance to this truly interdisciplinary field of enquiry encompassing developmental psychology, cultural anthropology and comparative sociology. The text is organized into five coherent parts: Part 1: Developmental theory and methodology; Part 2: Analysis of environments for human development Part 3: Cultural organization of pregnancy and infancy; Part 4: Early childhood development; and Part 5: Entering the world of activities - culturally ruled.