Presentation Information
[SY-113]Cultural Consensus: A Structured Mixed-Methods Approach to Studying Cultural Models of Mental Illness
Andrew Ryder (Concordia University (Montreal, Canada)(Canada))
Keywords:
Cultural-clinical psychology,Cognitive anthropology,Mental health beliefs,Mixed methods
Cultural psychiatry has demonstrated how research needs to be situated in cultural context, with potential for misunderstanding, stereotyping, and clinical error when this is not done properly. Anthropologists have contributed the ethnographic method, which uses careful observation and thick description to document particular cultural-historical settings, but the approach is highly time consuming, often requiring years of study. Cross-cultural psychologists instead proposed comparative studies with self-report surveys, which are much quicker but too often impose content on the contexts under study, rather than allowing cultural understandings to emerge in a bottom-up manner. To help resolve this dilemma, the researchers in this symposium advocate the use of a cultural models approach to the study of both normalcy and deviancy (Chentsova-Dutton & Ryder, 2020), grounded in a method from cognitive anthropology: cultural consensus (Dressler, 2017). Ryder will launch the symposium by providing the background for cultural consensus, including the three phases of research in this tradition—free listing, pile sorting, and cultural consensus analysis—while describing the ways this approach can be used to study models of normalcy and deviancy that pertain to cultural psychiatry. Kessai will then present research conducted among the Tuareg people in southern Algeria, specifically results from free listing data collected on local mental health beliefs. Nachabe will then follow with research on migrants to Montreal who have origins in the Levant region of the Middle East, emphasizing findings from pile sort data collected on how these migrants organize their beliefs about depression. Finally, Borges will present research on beliefs about normalcy held by Brazilian and Canadian men and women, especially on gender norms and ideals, demonstrating how preliminary estimates of cultural consensus is obtainable from free listing data.