Cultural Factors

1. Cultural Factors How do cultural factors contribute to emotional and behavioral disorders?

2. Appeal of Cultural Factors as Causal Explanations • Macroculture -Nations and other large entities • Microculture -Smaller groups within macrocultures • Cultural Norms -Conflicting values can affect emotional and behavioral development

3. Conflicting Cultural Values and Standards • Hitting and aggression vs. corporal punishment • Children of interracial marriages • Fostering violence in media and entertainment • Teenage pregnancy

4. A Multicultural Perspective • Issues of cultural bias • Societal dominance by European microcultures • What standards of conduct should we use?

5. Problems in Evaluating the Effects of Cultural Factors • Untangling effects of individual factors is impossible. • Research is limited or nonexistent. • Interrelation of culture and temperament.

6. Biology, Family, School, and Culture: A Tangled Web of Causal Influences • Role of schools in American culture. • Deterioration of family and other social institutions. • Genetics and environment.

7. Mass Media • Includes printed materials, radio, television, motion pictures, and the Internet. • Television and aggressive, violent behavior.

8. Television and Violence • Bandura’s Social Cognitive Model • Person variables • Thoughts and feelings about violence and characters in the media • Social environment • School, home, community • Behavior • Child’s selection of violent programs and aggressive responses to problem situations

9. Effects of TV on children with EBD • Sprafkin, GGadow, and Adelman (1992) • Gadow and Sprafkin (1993) • No effects on prosocial behavior • Negative effects of high levels of viewing regardless of content

10. Peer Group • Positive, reciprocal peer relationships -Critical for normal social development • Peer group pressure -Can lead to maladaptive patterns of behavior

11. Absence of Positive Peer Relationships • High status or social acceptance -Associated with helpfulness, friendliness, and conformity to rules • Low status or social rejection -Associated with hostility, disruptiveness, and aggression • Social Skills Training -Often yields equivocal results

12. Undesirable Peer Socialization • Peer pressure • Socialization to deviant groups • Pressure to reject academic tasks

13. Neighborhood and Urbanization • Social class • Quality of physical surroundings • Available psychological support systems • Separating urban environments from other causal factors is difficult

14. Ethnicity • Increasingly difficult to define • Not clear if ethnicity is related to delinquency • Lack of political and social power for ethnic groups

15. Social Class and Poverty • Poverty is a factor in development of disordered behavior • Social class is probably not a factor • Poverty is the best predictor of school failure • Many social programs work to mitigate the effects of poverty

16. Implications for Educators • Cultural factors may contribute to students’ emotional or behavioral problems. • Teachers must always refer to cultural and community norms. • Large-scale social changes cannot be achieved by educators alone.