Providing a Vehicle for Students and Faculty to Share Observations of Other Cultures

The appropriate interpretation and use of specific research findings are often facilitated by international perspectives and observations from different cultures. Sometimes, assumptions about families may be questioned from observations from different cultures. For example, based on family research from the United States, it is often assumed that an important role of parents is to ensure that children have high self-esteem. But, we have discovered that building children's self-esteem is not nearly as valued as a parenting goal in many other cultures. In many cases, it is useful to think about the concerns and behaviors that may be intrinsic to the human experience (for example, for families around the world) and those that may be unique to specific cultures within the United States.

There are a variety of ways that observations from international experiences can benefit our understanding of families and family research. For example, the current Director of the Family Studies Initiative (Linda Anooshian) was a Visiting Professor for the USAC (University Studies Abroad Consortium) Program in San Sebastian, Spain, in the Fall semester of 2003. During that time, she observed that families in Northern Spain appeared to be less concerned about children being well-behaved in public than was the case for families in Idaho. This led to additional survey research that suggested that valuing the teaching of "manners" as a parenting goal was more associated with the potential for negative parenting influences in the San Sebastian sample than in the Boise sample.

It is likely that there are a variety of different ways in which observations of children, parents, and families in different cultures can improve and expand our thinking about research findings from Idaho and/or the United States.

With this web site, the Family Studies Initiative hopes to begin sharing experiences and observations from diverse groups (e.g., U.S. students who have studied abroad, international students studying at Boise State University) who have had the opportunity to observe families in different cultural contexts.

For example, the following pictures and comments came from Linda Anooshian’s (Department of Psychology) visit to Chile through the USAC (University Studies Abroad Consortium) program.

A CHILEAN SCHOOL

In this small, rural village in Northern Chile, the family poverty was obvious and pervasive.  In the United States, this level of poverty would likely be associated with poor educational opportunities.  With the great national wealth of the United States, it is still common for children from poor families to experience the negative social stigma associated with being poor, to live in dangerous neighborhoods, and/or attend schools with little economic or social support from surrounding neighborhoods.  In contrast, in this impoverished area of Chile, young children attending this school appeared to feel cherished by their teacher and by their surrounding village community.  These kinds of observations challenge us to think about the barriers to quality education for many poor children in the United States.  Where do these barriers come from?  Certainly they do not reflect the inability to bear the costs of quality educational experiences for young children.  

 

 

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