Search

Although attention has been paid to return migration internationally, research studies on why Chinese overseas doctoral graduates return to China are few. A study that considers gendered motivations has yet to be found. Using a qualitative study with 31 Chinese overseas doctoral graduate returnees, this study examines factors influencing graduates' reasons for returning to China and how these relate to Chinese gender and gender role‐related cultural norms. Using the push‐pull theory and the concepts of gender (as an individual characteristic) and gender norms, the study shows that the reasons for return were gendered, with females motivated by family and emotional factors and males by economic and career benefits. The study identifies inequalities derived from traditional gender roles and cultural norms that persist in China. This has implications for state policy, higher education institutions and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The purpose of this study is to understand the role of suicide literacy and suicide stigma in laypeople's intention to recommend professional help in Korea. Additionally, the study focuses on the role of expressive suppression as a sociocultural factor. Methods: Participants read vignettes depicting either subclinical distress or suicidal ideation and answered questions measuring suicide literacy, stigma, and expressive suppression. Mediated moderation analyses were used to examine the interactions between these factors. Results: The result found the significant effect of expressive suppression. The mediating effect of suicide stigma on the relationship between suicide literacy and recommendation of professional help was significant for those who do not suppress their emotions. This result indicates that when individuals were not hesitant to express negative emotions, high suicide literacy lowered suicide stigma and led to more willingness to recommend professional help. Conclusions: The results showed that expressive suppression acts as a barrier deterring Koreans from professional help for their mental health. The findings underscore the importance of sociocultural factors such as expressive suppression in developing suicide prevention strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescent attitudes toward housing are influenced by established norms, particularly preferences for single‐family detached dwellings, years before making independent housing‐related decisions. In today's challenging homeownership landscape, this study, guided by housing adjustment theory, explores the timing and factors shaping adolescents' awareness of housing. In surveying 12–18‐year‐old 4‐H participants in a Southeastern state, age emerges as a pivotal factor, with awareness of housing by at least age 12. The impact of housing costs on participants' responses suggests exposure to broader affordability challenges. Analyzing these early experiences may offer educational opportunities to empower adolescents to make informed housing decisions later in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because bread consumption significantly contributes to salt intake and health risk, the acceptance of low‐salt reformulations has mainly been examined from an organoleptic perspective. However, the influence of cultural patterns has largely been neglected; working in the French context, our study aimed to fill this gap by considering the conflicts between health and cultural norms associated with bread, a totem food. We adopted a sequential and mixed (qualitative and quantitative) research approach based on interviews to grasp the cultural representations associated with bread and to sodium‐reduction strategy and based on a quantitative survey at worksite canteens that combined the overall sensory appreciation of a reformulated bread, along with a questionnaire on motivations and attitudes. We used structural equation modeling to explore the acceptance of this new bread, as well as segment analysis to highlight the potential heterogeneity among consumers. The results showed the influence of sensory appreciation and health motivations, which were found to be highly determined by the perceived benefits of a low‐salt diet. Unexpectedly, an attachment to the cultural values associated with traditional bread and seeking hedonism through salty food did not inhibit the consumption of reformulated bread. We discussed the scope of an approach embracing the normative pluralism around a totem food to better envision the future of low‐salt bread in collective food services. Practical implications can help restaurant managers promote sodium‐reduced meals while ensuring compliance with social normativity and cultural values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies an anthropological perspective of violence to critique and interrogate the concept of social justice. It analyses Bangladeshi sex workers' "lived experience" of symbolic and structural violence in different social worlds—the community and family, and brothels—as a new framework for understanding social injustice. We find that violence and injustice exist in a complex web of power, identity, social structures and culture, shaped by power relations, discriminating social structures, and oppressive cultural norms which push the sex workers into the cycles of violence. These forms of violence impede an individual's capabilities, life chances and dignity, the factors that determine one's experience of social justice. From a social policy perspective, our study suggests that social justice to sex workers concerns, first and foremost, with addressing their needs for safety and security, thus, enabling them to experience equity, dignity, protection and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children are expected to self‐regulate their behaviour, even in emotionally charged situations. Yet, such expectations for self‐regulation, the degree to which compliance is expected, and the specific regulatory behaviours deemed desirable, vary by culture, age of child, and specific situation. In this study, 34 Chinese (17 females) and 39 U.S. (19 females) preschoolers were observed and compared in two socioemotionally challenging situations. Children's compliance to explicit and implicit rules, their regulatory behaviours, and the associations between regulatory behaviours and rule compliance were analysed across the two samples. U.S. children showed greater resistance to temptation and similar levels of repair of mishap as compared to Chinese children. In addition, Chinese children used more avoidance and self‐soothing strategies and fewer distractive strategies than U.S. children. The effectiveness of regulatory behaviours in predicting rule compliance varied by both task condition and cultural group. Object and self distractions were associated with lower rule compliance in the mishap task. Social distraction was positively predictive of U.S. children's rule compliance in the mishap task, but negatively associated with their compliance in the temptation task. Social distraction was unhelpful for Chinese children's compliance in both tasks. The complexities of cultural variations and dynamics in their relations to children's rule compliance and regulatory behaviours are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hypertensive disorders are a leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality worldwide. Despite advances in prevention and clinical management, women in low‐resource countries continue to bear the burden of the sequelae of severe pre‐eclampsia–eclampsia. Sustainable strategies to improve the care of women with hypertensive disease, to identify those at risk for hypertensive disease, and to reduce the risk of eclampsia will require partnerships between clinicians and health policy makers. Resources are needed to scale up healthcare access and infrastructure, establish evidence‐based protocols for care, and ensure an adequate supply of equipment and drugs. Additionally, efforts for a sustained workforce of perinatal clinicians and staff trained in the assessment and management of hypertensive disease are needed. Effective postpartum care and monitoring are essential to prevent morbidity and mortality due to cardiovascular disease. Culturally appropriate strategies are needed to educate women and their families on the symptoms of pre‐eclampsia to address delays in seeking care during pregnancy and postpartum. With targeted, sustained efforts and resources, eclampsia and its associated co‐morbidities can be preventable. Mortality from eclampsia may be prevented through access to trained personnel, medical equipment, and antihypertensive medications, and recognition of social determinants and cultural norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in social psychological research have shown that national integration policies influence how immigrants are perceived and treated by the mainstream population. However, the processes by which these policies come to have an impact on prejudice and well‐being of the general population are largely unknown. Moreover, past research has often relied on unrepresentative samples limiting generalizability. The present research proposes that when the national integration policies of a given society are perceived as clearly defined and coherent, they have a direct impact on the perceived cultural norm related to those national integration policies. In turn, the perceived cultural norm affects personal attitudes toward cultural norms (i.e., the degree to which individuals support a given policy), which influence the level of anti‐immigrant prejudice as well as psychological well‐being. Findings from two correlational studies with representative samples of the mainstream population conducted in France on the policy of secularism (N = 940) and in Québec on the policy of interculturalism (N = 912) supported the proposed theoretical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accessible summary: Persons with learning disability who live in Malta, especially women, feel they do not have as many opportunities to make friends and form relationships as other persons who do not have a learning disability.Persons with learning disability feel lonely but wish they had the opportunity to do the things non‐disabled people do, such as have relationships, get married, live on their own and have children.At times, their parents and people who work with them do not help them with this.It is important that persons with learning disability from a young age are supported and empowered so that they can exercise their sexual rights. Background: This paper explores the sexuality of young persons with learning disability in Malta with respect to their opportunities and the constraints they experience. Materials and Methods: Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to decode qualitative data collected from persons with learning disability. Results: Findings reveal a context of disabling social attitudes, stereotypical gender imagery and exclusionary social practices. In addition, youth with learning disability experience a lack of community support and social networking, thus calling for platforms and spheres where they can form and maintain friendships and relationships. Conclusions: It is concluded that Malta lacks the fundamental social acceptance that persons with learning disability are sexual beings, with the right to express their sexuality and to form relationships. Overcoming such cultural hurdles will empower persons with learning disability to establish and express their sexual identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before commenting on the papers from a recent interdisciplinary gathering of scholars from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, a case is made for regional academia conversations today, because international conferences, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are still dominated by 'Western' traditions, discourse, and protocols. After touching on the relative stability or variability of phenomena and procedures in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, political and cultural questions are considered along with some of the ongoing consequences of the East Asian adoption of the European model of the modern research university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out a framework for a comprehensive theory of Body Dysmorphic Disorder ( BDD), based on interview data and theoretical reading. It combines psychoanalytic, cultural and political insights. It develops the author's earlier work on body hatred ( Parker, 2003). The role of the other - actual, imagined or fantasized - is central, and ambivalence about the body, inflated by shame, is key to this dynamic. Any part of the body may be involved, and checking is compulsive, betraying an omnipotent struggle for acceptability and normality. The author suggests that BDD sufferers are especially sensitive to the power, pleasure and pain of looking and being looked at, with the objective sense of self dominating any subjective sense. Object relations provides explanations of individual differences in susceptibility to BDD, through failures of maternal mirroring. Lacan's theory of the mirror stage explains the origin of the ambivalent relation of the subject to his/her own image, rivalry with self and other, shame and desire, as well as the enduring power of cultural norms of appearance. Freud's ideas on taboo and ambivalence, and their dynamics in changing cultural forms, are illustrated and linked to Douglas's ideas of pollution and taboo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore the joint dynamics between gender inequality and cultural norms along the process of development. Cultural norms regarding gender roles are shaped by the relative female labor supply, and thus depend on the gender gap in education. In turn, these norms influence the relative education provided to boys and girls. I show that this two-way causality between the inegalitarian nature of norms and the educational gender gap might explain the emergence of high gender inequality and low development traps. The model also makes it possible to replicate a U-shaped relationship between the relative status of women and the economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here I review recent research on reproductive conflict between females in families and how it influences their reproductive behaviour. Kin selection can favor cooperation between parent and offspring, siblings, or unrelated co-residents who share interests in other family members such as grand-offspring. However, these are also the individuals most likely to be sharing resources, and so conflict can also emerge. While substantial interest has arisen in evolutionary anthropology, especially over the last two decades, in the possibility of cooperative breeding in humans, less attention has been paid to reproductive conflict among female kin. Communal breeding in animals is generally understood as emerging from competition over the resources needed to breed. Competition for household resources is a problem that also faces human families. Models suggest that in some circumstances, inclusive fitness can be maximized by sharing reproduction rather than harming relatives by fighting with them, even if the shares that emerge are not equal. Thus, competition and cooperation turn out to be strongly related to each other. Reproductive competition within and between families may have underpinned the biological evolution of fertility patterns (such as menopause) and the cultural evolution of marriage, residence, and inheritance norms (such as late male marriage or primogeniture), which can enhance cooperation and minimize the observed incidence of such conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our increasingly mobile world, more of us are caught between cultures rather than in one culture. We straddle different ethnic, racial, political, geographical, and religious groups, forced into awareness of the precarious nature of our self-definition, involuntarily gazing at the constructed nature of our cultural norms, unable to avoid reckoning with the choices of which collective to honour. The impossibility of separating individual from collective is foundational to work as Jungian practitioners, but a paradox of individuation is becoming free of the control of collective norms while simultaneously living within those very norms. In such a conflict it becomes easy to overlook the fact that when the norms we have incorporated into ourselves are from cultures vastly different from the one in which we live, the cacophony can be overwhelming. In this paper, I will draw from postmodern theorists such as Derrida, Foucault and Irigaray in an effort to re-imagine the role of culture in psychodynamic process. The case of a Muslim Iranian man working with a Christian American woman analyst will be used to explore the complexity of a multitude of cultural norms present in the consulting room. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asian cultures are widely held to be fairly homogeneous in that they highly value harmonious social relationships. We propose, however, that the focus (dyadic versus group) and the nature (emotional versus instrumental) of social relations vary among the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures in ways that have important implications for the negotiation tactics typically employed by managers from these three cultures. Our data are from a web survey administered to three hundred eighty-eight managers from China, Japan, and South Korea. In this article, we discuss how the differences in the focus and the nature of business relationships in China, Japan, and Korea are manifested in the different norms for negotiation tactics endorsed by managers from these three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study determines the extent to which admissions criteria and cultural norms predict the success of a foreign-trained dentist in a United States dental educational program. Correlation and regression tests were applied to an eleven-year period from 1994 to 2004 of retrospective admissions data for 144 International Dental Studies Program students. Five cultural norms were derived from the collective cultural dimensions of a scholarly work of validated multinational surveys by Geert Hofstede. These five cultural norms are Power Distance (degree of inequality between "haves" and "have-nots" in a culture); Individualism (support for independent or group behavior); Long-Term View (deferred gratification versus quick results/rewards); Masculinity (emphasis on performance/outcomes versus socialization); and Uncertainty Avoidance (ability to cope with an uncertain future). Hofstede's calculated country scores on these cultural dimensions applied to the students' countries of education and their influence on students' academic performance were assessed by correlation and regression analyses. Results showed that the TOEFL and National Board Part 1 examinations and the cultural norm of Long-Term View were the most positive predictors of grade point averages. The other four cultural norms studied were not predictors of success. Those who applied to the program more than once before being accepted did less well in the program, yet "less Well" might have meant that they graduated with a 3.0 instead of a 3.5 GPA. Generally speaking, the more recent the graduated class, the higher the ending GPA has been. Admissions committees should determine if they want to invest the resources required to implement a multitude of admissions predictors to find the best of the qualified applicants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence against women has been a problem in human cultures for centuries. This is still the case both in developed and in developing countries, but it is in developing countries where the problem is aggravated as the result of cultural norms that are tolerant of men exerting power over women and girls as a commonly accepted practice. This power is often put into practice through physical and psychological acts of violence. In Mexico, as in many other countries, there is a legal framework that protects women from such acts, yet in the case of Mexico it has not yet been translated into actual improvements in their lives. We present an overview of advances in legal remedies regarding violence towards females internationally and in Mexico. The fact that these advances per se do not lead to changes in social norms that tolerate violence against females is emphasized. Also presented is the experience of the Mexican Institute for Research on Family and Population (IMIFAP) with the design and implementation of programs that promote protective factors and changes in behaviors in such a way that violence is effectively prevented. These programs focus on the development of psychosocial skills and knowledge through participatory workshops that promote self reflection, and they are developed and evaluated before being then applied on a large scale in poverty-stricken communities. These workshops lead to more egalitarian relationships between genders. IMIFAP's programs address not only violence but also other areas are integrated such that the enablement of psychosocial skills is applied in the broader socio-cultural context, leading to healthier and economically more productive lives. These programs are derived from the Framework for Enabling Agentic Empowerment (FENAE), which enables choice and the development of agentic empowerment through integrating skills, knowledge, and the context in which people live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1997, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism sponsored an International Workshop on Consumption Measures and Models for Use in Policy Development and Evaluation in Bethesda, MD. This paper is based on the 'Cultural and Subgroup Issues in Measuring Consumption' session chaired by Raul Caetano; discussants were Raul Caetano, Salme Ahlström, Fe Caces, Paul Lemmens, Robin Room, Kathryn Graham, and Richard Wilsnack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a study which compares sibling relationships between industrialized and non-industrialized societies. It explores sibling relationships in a variety of different cultures from a cross-cultural perspective, examining older siblings' caretaking and socialization of younger siblings, normative sibling behaviors among adults, and the quality of sibling relationships over the life span, considering the effects of sibling structure variables such as gender and birth order. It was found that in industrialized societies, sibling structure has an influence on sibling relationships, but in non-industrialized societies sibling structure, variables are the criteria for establishing normative relationships between siblings, with roles established by birth order and gender. The differences in sibling relationships in the two types of societies are at least partly due to differences in their basic economic structure. Industrialized societies are characterized by a high degree of industrialization, technological advance, and relative affluence, whereas non-industrialized societies tend to be agrarian or pastoral, village-centered, and relatively poor. Overall, sibling relationships in industrialized societies tend to be discretionary while they tend to be obligatory in non-industrialized societies.