Culture and the Individual by William W Dressler

Author:William W Dressler [Dressler, William W]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781351672832
Google: 5sEtDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 34506998
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-20T01:58:44+00:00

The Concept and Measurement of Cultural Consonance: An Example

There is thus a clear history in research on culture and health of trying to link individuals and their own beliefs and behaviors to collective and shared understandings. I am not the first to this table by any means. But previous researchers found it difficult to move those ideas forward, because neither the theoretical nor methodological tools available to investigators have been equal to the task. Conceptual and methodological tools do one important job: they enable us as researchers to reach into the world around us and organize our observations systematically to reflect back on the theories we are trying to test. To the extent that those observations are consistent with what we anticipate, we can have greater confidence that this is a useful way of thinking about the world. And, more important, this process reveals to us patterns that we did not anticipate, which in turn moves that work forward.

The combination of a cognitive theory of culture, the cultural consensus model, and the concept and measurement of cultural consonance, provides a means of linking culture and the individual in a way that was unavailable to previous investigators, even though many of them—from Sapir to Cassel—recognized the importance of doing so. The concept of cultural consonance emerged in research that I carried out with my Brazilian colleagues in 1991 (Dressler 1996). At that point we had collected data on lifestyle and social support, using a combination of ethnographical methods and social survey research that I had employed in my previous work on modernization and disease risk. There were existing scales of lifestyle and social support that had been developed in an earlier project and, after some ethnographical interviewing to determine that the items making up these scales were still meaningful and relevant, we proceeded with survey research. At the same time, we collected data that were suitable for analysis with the cultural consensus model. Our main objectives in collecting those data were to determine that individuals shared an understanding of the importance of the lifestyle and social support items in their respective domains, and that this sharing extended across groups differing in socioeconomic status.

We asked the consensus sample to rate the importance of the lifestyle items as indicators that an individual would be considered “a success in life.” This notion of being a success in life was arrived at in discussions among our research team, including me and my co-investigators, and our survey interviewers, both of whom were Brazilian psychology students. For social support, persons standing in particular relationships (e.g., family, friend, neighbor, and compadre) were ranked as potential supporters in relation to specific problems. We found that there was cultural consensus regarding the relative importance of lifestyle items as well as in the ranking of potential sources of social support. Furthermore, that consensus extended across the range of socioeconomic status (Dressler, Balieiro, & Dos Santos 1997; Dressler, Dos Santos, & Balieiro 1996).

Figure 5.2 Association of cultural consonance in lifestyle and cultural

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