0.1 Culture and personality  (Page 3/16)

The next important issue is the difference between emic and etic tasks or behaviors. Simply put, emic tasks are those that are familiar to the members of a given culture, whereas etic tasks are common to all cultures. In an elegantly simple, yet revealing study, Irwin, Schafer,&Feiden (1974) demonstrated these phenomena in two cultures: American undergraduates and Mano rice farmers (from Liberia). The American college students were consistently better at performing the Wisconsin Card Sort, a well-known psychological test measuring cognitive reasoning skills, which relies on geometric shapes and color. The Mano farmers, however, were consistently better at sorting different categories of rice. Thus, the ability to sort items into categories appears to be an etic task (most likely common to all humans, regardless of culture), whereas the more specific abilities to sort by geometry and color (common to American college students) or type of rice grain (common to Mano farmers in Liberia) is an emic task that requires familiarity. Thus, if we made a judgment about the Mano farmers’ cognitive abilities based on the Wisconsin Card Sort, we would clearly be making a mistake in comparing them to Americans, due to the unfamiliarity of the particular task.

Another important aspect of cross-cultural research, which may involve applying our understanding of etics and emics, is the issue of equivalence . Is a concept being studied actually equivalent in different cultures? In other words, does a concept mean the same thing in different cultures, is the comparison valid? For example, an etic related to intelligence is the ability to solve problems. So how might we compare different cultural groups? Would the speed with which they solve a problem make sense as a measure of intelligence? Such an answer would be emic, and therefore valid, in America (where we typically value independence and competition). However, among the Baganda of Uganda, slow and careful thought is the emic. Among the Chi-Chewa of Zambia, the emic is responsibility to the community, i.e., solving the problem in order to best get along with other people. Thus, the speed at which people solve problems is conceptually equivalent, since it is the way in which people in each culture identify those individuals who are considered intelligent (Brislin, 2000). However, we cannot compare the actual speed of reporting a solution to others, as this is viewed quite differently in each culture.

One particular type of equivalence that raises a very interesting problem is that of translation equivalence . Psychologists often want to use tests developed in their own language with people of a different culture who speak a different language. Translating a test from one language to another can be a difficult task. The best way to assess translation equivalence is through back translation . In this procedure, one person translates the test, or survey, into the foreign language, and then a different person translates the foreign language test back into the original language. The original test can then be compared to the back translated test to see how closely they are worded. Ideally they would be identical, but this is seldom the case. To give you a simple example, when I was in graduate school, we had a student from Taiwan join our research group. One day I asked her to translate my last name, Kelland, into a Chinese character. When she had done that, I asked her how she would translate that particular Chinese character into English for someone who was not Chinese. She translated the character as Kwang. Despite the first letter, I hardly consider Kwang to be a reasonable translation of Kelland, but she didn’t seem to think of this as much of a problem (perhaps revealing another cultural difference!). When the process of back translation is used successfully, which may involve working back and forth with the translations, it has the effect of decentering the test from the original language. Specifically, that means that the test should be free of any culturally emic references or aspects that interfere with the translation equivalence of the different versions of the test (Brislin, 2000; Matsumoto&Juang, 2004).