Context: Some patients, known as expert patients, strive to improve the performance of the health care system. The precise nature of their activities, skills and personality traits are unclear however, which could compromise their recognition. Methods: This study was conducted based on the assumptions of methodological individualism and social constructivism. We identified twelve expert patient...

Collectivism is better than individualism as the former holds the community together more than the latter do. Paradoxically, individualists tend to believe that there are universal values that should be shared by all, while collectivists tend to accept that different groups have different values. Many of the Asian cultures are collectivist, while Anglo cultures tend to be individualist. This pa...

Various researchers (i.e., Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand,1995; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) have suggested that the cultural variables of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism correspond to Fiske’s (1991, 1992) relational models of collectivism, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. In this study, we tested this claim in a cross-cultural comparison betw...

Individualism and collectivism refer to cultural values that influence how people construe themselves and their relation to the world. Individualists perceive themselves as stable entities, autonomous from other people and their environment, while collectivists view themselves as dynamic entities, continually defined by their social context and relationships. Despite rich understanding of how i...

The concept of individualism in the field of sociology was introduced by the empirical scheme of one's position in society. The growing importance of the attention to this pattern affected by social changes has been rapid and rough. Cultural and social processes of modernization and modern age always create new conditions and stimulus leading to changes and verities in methods of individualizat...

Results of this experiment demonstrate that individualists and collectivists react differently to minority influence. Based on the distinction between objectivity and preference norms in the minority influence literature, we hypothesize that individualism and collectivism influence (A) responses to minority influence (focusing on the target of influence) and (B) effectiveness of minority influe...

A STARTING POINT This volume represents the collective construction of a specifically anthropological approach to a question at the heart of all social science. How should we simultaneously account for both society and for individuals? Unlike most social science books about the individual, this volume is not concerned with individualism nor with the way different societies conceptualise individ...

This research project examined the extent to which an individual’s religion, or lack thereof, impacted their scores on the Individualism Collectivism Scale (Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand, 1995). This study drew 205 mostly Caucasian participants, who were diverse in terms of gender, income, and education. Data were gathered via online survey, which gathered responses to a demographic for...

There are several approaches in the social sciences that seek to provide causal explanations of social phenomena neither in terms of general causal laws nor in terms of case-specific narratives , but, at a middle level of generality, in terms of recurrent causal patterns or “mechanisms ” (Hedström and Swedberg 1998 ). Typically, these approaches invoke micro-mechanisms to explain macro-social p...