A cross-sectional study covering 380 male partners and their spouses was conducted in Busia district in Western Kenya to establish demographic, socio-economic and cultural factors that affect male partner participation in promoting deliveries by skilled attendants. The study showed a significant relationship between level of education (P=0.0000) and level of income (P=0.0004) of the male partne...

A mixed-method exploratory approach was employed to examine the relationship between epistemological beliefs and quality of thinking when participants first thought about an ill-structured problem alone, and then with another person in a dyad. The results showed that there was not a systematic connection between epistemological beliefs and ill-structured problem solving in either solo or paired...

CULTURE: Everything that human beings (and possibly some other species) do that isn’t motivated solely by natural instinct. Sleeping is natural, not cultural, but sleeping using a pillow is cultural. Eating acorns to stave off starvation is natural; eating acorn bread is cultural. Laughing is natural; laughing at a knock-knock joke is cultural. Culture includes tool-making and -using, creative ...

It has been claimed that a meaningful theory of cultural evolution is not possible because human beliefs and behaviors do not follow predictable patterns. However, theoretical models of cultural transmission and observations of the development of societies suggest that patterns in cultural evolution do occur. Here, we analyze whether two sets of related cultural traits, one tested against the e...

I examine traditional Okinawan cultural beliefs regarding mental health care, and how these differ from Western approaches used in Okinawa, often hindering treatment outcomes. Identifying Okinawan mental health beliefs and their differences and commonalities with Western health care practices can begin a dialogue leading to an integrated approach that more fully considers the limitations and be...

Currently, ethnic and racial minority individuals represent a large proportion of the U.S. population, and researchers expect that they will represent the majority of the population by 2050. This shift in U.S. demographics calls for a greater awareness and integration of cultural issues into the assessment and treatment of ethnically and linguistically diverse clients. This article examines the...

Cultural dynamics can be heavily influenced by extremists. To better understand this influence, temporal dynamics of an arbitrary cultural belief are simulated in a simple computational model. Extremist agents, holding an immutable and extreme belief, are used to examine the process of polarization – adoption of the extremist belief by the entire population. Two possible methods of counteractin...

The growing national racial and ethnic diversity has created a greater need for health care delivery systems and health care providers to be more responsive to unique patient needs, that goes beyond meeting the immediate health problems to include attention to other critical component of patient care that take into account cultural competency such as health literacy, health beliefs and behavior...

Outline 1 What is Cross-Cultural Research? Cultural coherence or decoherence within and between human communities: human behavior, beliefs, and institutions 2 A Course in Cross-Cultural Research 3 Goals and Outcome 4 Tools: Spss; Maps and MapTab; Statistics for Galton’s Problem 5 Topics and Terms: Lists of Topics; Files; References; Glossary 6 Resources: e.g., On-line articles, e.g., JSTOR “Pol...

Cognitive psychological research focuses on causal learning and reasoning while cognitive anthropological and social science research tend to focus on systems of beliefs. Our aim was to explore how these two types of research can inform each other. Cognitive psychological theories (causal model theory and causal Bayes nets) were used to derive predictions for systems of causal beliefs. These pr...