Future Issues for Cross-Cultural Psychology: Research on Parenting

抄録

The present article reviews historical characteristics of cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology, and then reviews cross-cultural psychology parenting research on gender-roles in parenting and parenting style. The present article then introduces 2 approaches for overcoming the cultural dichotomy that began being debated in the 1990s. The first approach, based on research up to that point comparing and contrasting parenting in the West and Asia, is to carry out a comparison of adjacent regions as found in Asian regional research. The other approach is to not concentrate solely on the differences between nations, but to take into account socioeconomic factors within nations. Three future issues are suggested for cross-cultural psychology:(1) research on how best to guarantee equivalence of measurement when evaluating a culture,(2) an examination of not only the effect on individual development of changes in macro factors such as socioeconomic status, work patterns, educational patterns, childcare, and education platforms, but also, from a socio-historical viewpoint, of the type of changes in group and social affiliation that are brought about by changes in an individual's parenting, and (3) research on the relation between macro and micro factors. Longitudinal studies are required of the development of children who move across cultures and child-parent relations in intercultural, multilingual families, in order to clarify the relation the macro factors and micro factors, such as behavior, that children learn from their parents, and whether these factors have any life-long effects on the development of an individual's parenting. By focusing on the above issues, future cross-cultural psychology research can move beyond simply clarifying the similarities and differences between cultures, and in addition contribute to clarification of how values development processes are different for parents and their children who move between different cultures and children who live in multiple cultures.