Validating Cultureand Gender-Specific Constructs

SUMMARY

Despite on-going calls for developing cultural competency among mental health practitioners, few assessment instruments consider cultural variation in psychological constructs. To meet the challenge of developing measures for minority and international students, it is necessary to account for the influence culture may have on the latent constructs that form a given instrument. What complicates matters further is that individual factors (e.g., gender) within a culture necessitate additional refinement of factor structures on which such instruments are based. The current work endeavors to address these concerns by demonstrating a mixed-methods approach utilized to assess construct validation within a specific culture; and in turn develop culturally-specific instruments. Qualitative methods were used to inform the development of a structured self-report by gaining detailed knowledge of the target culture and creating items grounded in interview and observational data. Factor analysis techniques and triangulation with qualitative analyses validated these findings. Previous work (Sarkar, 2003) suggested a number of gender-specific perceptions of mental health constructs within the target culture and these were investigated using additional mixed-method analyses. This article demonstrates an emerging mixed-method technique for developing culturally sound assessment tools, offers guidance on how to incorporate the overall approach in assessment, and provides a basis for thinking critically about the use of existing instruments when working with diverse populations.     

Women's empowerment: the insights of Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai of Kenya has written about empowerment, practiced it in many ways in her own life, and shared her reflections on it with many other women in the Green Belt Movement. Yet to date, no study has been devoted to her ideas on the topic. This paper will highlight Maathai's insights regarding empowerment, tracing several important themes in her approach, namely, empowerment's relationship to self-esteem, teamwork, and political action, its ambivalent relationship to formal education, and the role of cultural traditions in providing alternatives to colonial-era cultural impositions and current exploitative effects of neo-liberal capitalism. After reviewing Maathai's thoughts on each of these topics, I will briefly draw upon other East African thinkers and Africanists' studies of East African communities to present corroborating evidence for Maathai's views or for challenges to her position. Listening to the perspectives of Maathai and other East Africans provides several important correctives to current popular uses of the term ‘empowerment’.     

OXTR rs53576 genotype and gender predict trait gratitude

Abstract

Dispositional gratitude was investigated in 190 (96 M, 94 F) participants with saliva samples genotyped for the oxytocin receptor gene single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs53576 (112 A-carriers, 78 GGs). Trait gratitude was measured using the Gratitude Questionnaire-6 (GQ-6), and trait empathy was assessed with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI Perspective Taking and Empathic Concern). Due to non-normal distributions of the GQ-6 by SNP group and by gender, non-parametric analyses using simulations and bootstrap 95% CIs were conducted. Results show main effects of SNP group (with GGs scoring higher than A-carriers) and gender (with females scoring higher than males) on trait gratitude. Given the associations of both the OXTR SNP rs53576 and gender with empathy, and the prosocial associations of trait empathy and gratitude, we tested an indirect effects model using PROCESS. Results showed that both SNP group and gender had an indirect effect on trait gratitude through trait empathy.     

Transsexuals in Sport–Fairness and Freedom,Regulation and Law

The question of if, and under what conditions transsexuals should be allowed to participate in sports in their acquired sex is becoming increasingly relevant partly because the number of transsexuals is increasing partly because many countries now provide mechanisms for achieving legal recognition as belonging to the new acquired sex. This paper develops (1) an analysis of the justification for maintaining sex segregation in some sports and (2) an account of the rights of transsexuals to be recognised in their new sex. On the basis of these two analyses it critically evaluates two set of rules for the participation of transsexuals in elite sports: the UK guidelines issued in pursuance of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the International Olympic Committee's guidelines. It is argued that these guidelines are conflicting and that a modified set of criteria is more justifiable.     

In the Halfway House of Ill Repute: Gender Verification under a Different Name,Still No Contribution to Fair Play

The aftermath of Caster Semenya’s resounding victory in the women’s 800?m at the 2009 Athletics World Championships in Berlin highlighted the ethical and scientific flaws of gender verification in women’s athletics. It has led the governing international body of professional athletics, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), to adopt new rules regarding athletes with differences of sexual developments (DSDs) in women’s competitions in 2011 (Regulations on Hyperandrogenism). The International Olympic Committee followed suit and adopted a similar set of rules in 2012. Locating the practice of gender verification in a history of sexist stereotyping of women athletes (in Section 1), I argue (in Section 2), following other critics, that the IAAF’s new rules suffer from the same ethical flaws as their predecessors; and specifically that they still invite and rely on qualitative measuring of an athlete’s femininity and masculinity. In the central section of this paper (Section 3), I relate the practice of gender verification to the vexing question of what constitutes an unfair advantage in sports. I suggest, first, that athletes with a DSD should be at liberty to exploit competitive advantages their conditions might confer on them, just as most athletes in most sports are at liberty to exploit their congenital traits (the only irrelevant difference being that DSDs are construed as gendered advantages). In a second step, I argue that gender segregation in sports and gender verification practices cannot both be defended by an appeal to fairness. If we want to preserve gender segregation, then we ought to give up gender verification; and if we are not prepared to give up regulation of gendered congenital advantages, then we ought to give up gender segregation in favor of a classification system that tracks genetic predisposition rather than gender.     

Technology,gender, and history: Toward a nonlinear model of social evolution

This paper presents a new nonlinear cognitive map of social evolution— sharply departing from the conventional 19th century‐based theories of linear stages from barbarism to civilization. It draws from a data base that includes the whole of humanity (both its female and male halves). And it takes into account new data from archaeology indicating that civilization is not only thousands of years older than previously thought, but originally oriented more closely to what the author calls a Partnership rather than a Dominator model of social organization. Covering over 25,000 years of social history, this article charts major technological phase changes—from the agricultural revolution circa 10,000 years ago to the industrial and more recently electronic revolutions or modern times—from the perspective of the tension between the Dominator and Partnership models. Most critically, it shows how the present period of social disequilibrium leads us to either an evolutionary breakdown or breakthrough, with the determining factor not technology per se, but rather how effectively and quickly we shift to a social organization orienting primarily to partnership rather than domination.     

Don't Predict the Future–Direct it! Comments on the intellectual history,the Logical and Applicative Visibility,and the Underlying Assumptions of Directed Evolution (DE)

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

—Alan Kay ¹ 1. Alan Kay is one of the inventors of the Smalltalk programming language and one of the originators of the idea of Object Oriented Programming. He is the conceiver of the laptop computer and the architect of the modern windowing GUI.

It is obvious that there are patterns of cultural change—evolution in the neutral sense—and any theory of cultural change worth more than a moment's consideration will have to be Darwinian in the minimal sense of being consistent with the theory of evolution by natural selection of Homo sapiens.

—Daniel Dennett ² 2. Daniel C. Dennett is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of several books, including Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), and Kinds of Minds (1996). This quote is taken from his forward to Darwinizing Culture (Aunger 2000 Aunger, R. 2000. Darwinizing culture: The status of memetics as a science, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar], ix).

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

—William Gibson ³ 3. In the early 1980s William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, coining the term “cyberspace” to describe computer-generated virtual realities long before we saw the similarities with today's Internet.

It is the magician's wand, by means of which he may summon into life whatever form and mould he pleases.

—Charles Darwin commenting on the power of artificial selection ⁴ 4. Here Darwin is explaining the power of artificial selection and its potential for the directed evolution of biological systems (domestication and commercially oriented breeding) in his Origin of Species (1859, 68).      

WOMEN'S SOCIALIZATION AND THE PREVALENCE OF DEPRESSION

No abstract available for this article.