Socio-Cultural & Socio-Economic Dimensions of Psychosocial Locus Standi

Socio-Cultural & Socio-Economic Dimensions of Psychosocial Locus Standi
Lecture note of Debdulal Dutta Roy
Associate Professor
Psychology Research Unit
Indian Statistical Institute
Kolkata
India

For
DoPT Sponsored Training Course: Psychosocial issues in Disaster Management
Administrative Training Institute
Salt Lake City, Sector-III, FC Block, Calcutta - 700106
Date: 26.10.16
Time: 14:15 - 15.45 hrs.

Slideshare of the lecture note: Click below

http://www.slideshare.net/ddroy/socio-cultural-amp-socioeconomic-dimensions-pps




What is disaster management ?

 Disaster management does not avert or eliminate the threats; instead, it focuses on creating plans to decrease the effect of disasters.

What are the phases of disaster management ?
Disaster management has four phases - Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery.

Mitigation involves identification of areas exposed to natural hazards with help of specialists for example, priority hospitals and critical health facilities. Suitable measures are to be taken to inform & sensitize & train those personnel involved in planning, administration, operation, maintenance through curricula.

Preparedness focuses on preparing equipment and procedures for use when a disaster occurs. This equipment and these procedures can be used to reduce vulnerability to disaster, to mitigate the impacts of a disaster or to respond more efficiently in an emergency.

The aim of emergency response is to provide immediate assistance to maintain life, improve health and support the morale of the affected population. Such assistance may range from providing specific but limited aid, such as assisting refugees with transport, temporary shelter, and food, to establishing semi-permanent settlement in camps and other locations. It also may involve initial repairs to damaged infrastructure.

The recovery phase starts after the immediate threat to human life has subsided. The immediate goal of the recovery phase is to bring the affected area back to normalcy as quickly as possible.


Is Socio-Cultural & Socio-Economic Dimensions of Psychosocial Locus Standi important in disaster management ? 

In management of disaster, emergency team  deals with the attitude, values and life styles of affected people. Affected people may not be interested to migrate from affected areas. They develop fear to change everyday life style. Acculturation stress is very common when people of different communities stay together.

What is Attitude ? 

Gordon Allport (1935), an early pioneer in attitude research, characterized the concept of attitude as distinctive and indispensable to social psychology. Allport (1984) defined attitude as a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related. There are three components of attitude - cognitive, affective and behavioural.  The cognitive component consists of the person’s thought process, perceptions and beliefs, and evaluations about the attitude object. For example, students may think that emergency team  provides adequate space to stay in the common room. The affective component gives an emotional or feeling aspect to the attitude which, results in an object being liked or disliked. In the example of adequate space in above, affected people may feel warmth or liking for the community room. The behavioural component refers to the tendency to act towards the object in a consistent and characteristic way. Again, following the above example, affected people student may want to move to the community hall.

Characteristics of attitude:

• Valence: It is the degree of positive or negative feeling about an attitude object that predicts what attitude scales normally measure.
• Centrality: It is the extent to which an attitude is a part of a person’s self-concept and reflects the individual’s identity.
• Interrelatedness: It is the extent to which an attitude is related to a person’s other attitudes.
• Stability: It is simply an attitude’s resistance to change.
• Salience: It is a person’s conscious awareness of the attitude.

Attitude change theories

1. Classical conditioning: A learning process that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired: a response which is at first elicited by the second stimulus is eventually elicited by the first stimulus alone.

2. Operant conditioning: Operant conditioning (also called "instrumental conditioning") is a type of learning in which (a) the strength of a behavior is modified by the behavior's consequences, such as reward or punishment, and (b) the behavior is controlled by antecedents called "discriminative stimuli" which come to signal those consequences .

3. Cognitive dissonance theory:  Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance etc. For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition).Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).

4. Persuasive communication:  Persuasion attempts to influence people's beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, or behaviors in relation to an event, idea, object, or other person(s). Persuasive communication achieves five things: stimulation, convincing, call to action, increasing consideration, and tolerance for alternative perspectives.

Levels of Attitude

Explicit attitudes are ones we consciously endorse and can easily report, Implicit level attitudes are involuntary, uncontrollable, and at times unconscious evaluations.


Theory of Planned Behaviour

The theory proposed by Icek Ajzen states that attitude toward behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, together shape an individual's behavioral intentions and behaviors. 

Key concepts:


Normative belief: an individual's perception of social normative pressures, or relevant others' beliefs that he or she should or should not perform such behavior.


Subjective norm: an individual's perception about the particular behavior, which is influenced by the judgment of significant others (e.g., parents, spouse, friends, teachers).[12]

Control beliefs: an individual's beliefs about the presence of factors that may facilitate or hinder performance of the behavior. The concept of perceived behavioral control is conceptually related to self-efficacy.

Perceived behavioral control: an individual's perceived ease or difficulty of performing the particular behavior. It is assumed that perceived behavioral control is determined by the total set of accessible control beliefs.

Behavioral intention: an indication of an individual's readiness to perform a given behavior. It is assumed to be an immediate antecedent of behavior. It is based on attitude toward the behavior, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control, with each predictor weighted for its importance in relation to the behavior and population of interest.

Behavior: an individual's observable response in a given situation with respect to a given target. Ajzen said a behavior is a function of compatible intentions and perceptions of behavioral control in that perceived behavioral control is expected to moderate the effect of intention on behavior, such that a favorable intention produces the behavior only when perceived behavioral control is strong.

What is Belief ?

It is an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof. It is trust, faith, or confidence in (someone or something).


What is socio-cultural environment ?

A sociocultural environment is a population, and it is described with special attention paid to social and cultural factors. It includes cultural norms, demographic information and religious information. This is sum total of a set of beliefs, customs, practices and behavior that exists within a population.

What is culture ?

The term 'culture' refers to attitudes and patterns of behavior in a given group.
Matsumoto (2004) defines Culture as a dynamic system of rules, explicit and implicit, established by groups in order to ensure their survival, involving attitudes, values, beliefs, norms, and behaviors.



What is cultural norm ?

'Norm' refers to attitudes and behaviors that are considered normal, typical or average within that group. All societies have cultural norms.

How does socio-cultural environment influence Psychosocial locus standi ?

Lev Vygotsky ( 1896- 1934)

One's cognitive structuring and restructuring depends on socio-cultural environment. A pioneer of the sociocultural approach was the Soviet psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896-1934), who became interested in developmental psychology and helped to change the face of the field. He proposed that interactions made by children can shape and influence both the way in which they perceive the world and their cognitive processes. The way children learn and develop varies from culture to culture and is sometimes specific to each individual society. While the resulting cognitive processes may be unique to each culture, the way in which they are handed down from generation to generation is often similar.Vygotsky cites three methods which are used to teach children skills. These tools are imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning.

1. Imitative Learning- Where one person tries to imitate or copy another.
2. Instructive Learning- Which involves remembering the instructions of the teacher and then using these instructions to self regulate.
3. Collaborative learning:  which involves a group of peers who strive to understand each other and work together to learn a specific skill.

Learning occurs best at the zone of proximal development (ZPD).

What is Zone of proximal development ?




 The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is the distance between a students ability to perform a task under adult guidance and or with peer collaboration; with the students ability of solving the problem independently. Vygotsky believed that learning occurred in this zone.
 For this to be a success the ZPD must contain two features
     1. Subjectivity- describes the process of two individuals begin a task with different understanding and eventually arrive at a shared understanding.
     2. Scaffolding- Refers to a change in the social support over the course of a teaching session. If it is successful, a  child's mastery level of performance can change, which means that it can increase a child's performance on a particular task. (implications for assessments with learning or behavior problems).


What is imitative learning ?

Imitative learning is defined by Tomasello et al. (1993) as a situation when the learner internalizes something of the model's goals and behavioural strategies. But sometimes individual learns by emulation. Emulation is a form of observational learning, different from imitation, which focuses on the action's environmental results instead of a model's action. Emulative learning is defined by Heine (2012) as a type of learning focused on the environmental events that are involved.