This study reports on community surveys of 160 representative Latino adults in Hartford, CT, Edinburg, TX, Guadalajara, Mexico; and in rural Guatemala. A 142-item questionnaire covered asthma beliefs and practices (e.g., causes, symptoms, and treatments). The cultural consensus model was used to analyze the agreement among respondents within each sample and to describe beliefs. Beliefs were the...

Teachers’ beliefs towards their students’ cultural backgrounds and languages affect all aspects of learning. Critical consciousness of attitudes and beliefs about the increasing culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) student population is necessary for aligning individual beliefs with effective teaching practices. Rethinking how to work with diverse students is central to how future teache...

This study investigated the cross-cultural and intra cultural diversity of mothers' beliefs and values regarding child rearing, education, and the causes of language impairment. Thirty Mexican-American and 30 Anglo-American mothers of children with language impairments completed 2 questionnaires, and 10 randomly selected mothers from each group participated in an interview. In addition, the Mex...

Along with other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, New Zealand's society is aging such that an increase in the number of older people requiring residential care is predicted. What cannot be foreseen is how culturally defined health beliefs affect the care given to older people in residential care. In this article, the authors describe and discuss the cultur...

This article posits that management theories and practices in the P. R. China have been influenced by three cultural forces: Confucianism, socialism, and capitalism. It explores the impact of the three ideological systems, cultural values, and beliefs on managerial philosophies and practices. It is suggested that contemporary organizational behavior and management practice in the P. R. China te...

This paper describes a tool for anticipating cultural behavior called, “CulBN.” The tool uses Bayesian belief networks to represent distributions of causal knowledge spread across members of cultural groups. CulBN simulations allow one to anticipate how changes in beliefs affect decisions and actions at the cultural level of analysis. An example case from a study of Afghan decision making is us...

* "Culture" can be understood as the way in which people make sense of the world by deploying shared meanings, attitudes, assumptions and values. * Doctors will frequently encounter patients whose lives are guided by ethical systems and values that are different from their own. * Individuals may differ in their beliefs about decision-making, regardless of their cultural background. * Doctors sh...

The authors reviewed the acculturation literature with the goal of identifying measures used to assess acculturation in Hispanic populations in the context of studies of health knowledge, attitudes, and behavior change. Twenty-six acculturation measures were identified and summarized. As the Hispanic population continues to grow in the United States, there is a need to develop rigorous accultur...

Four studies examined the hypothesis that, although people may generally want to savor, rather than to dampen, their positive emotions (i.e., hedonic emotion regulation), such a hedonic emotion regulation tendency should be less pronounced for Easterners than for Westerners. Using retrospective memory procedures, Study 1 found that Easterners recalled engaging in hedonic emotion regulation less...

Cultural theory elucidates conflicting opinions driving the climate change debate. Patterns of shared values and beliefs are described as cultural biases. These partial perspectives about society and environment legitimize four ways of life worldviews. This research tests whether cultural biases about the environment have the same structure as those about society to clarify their role in climat...