4.1.3 “Javanese” Psychologies 6
5.3 Fruitful Methodological Tensions
In addition, we consider it crucial to reflect upon the process of producing knowl-edge and related power dynamics. A fruitful approach has been developed in the field of feminist research (see Acker et al.1991; Behnke and Meusser1999; Wohlrab-Sahr 1993; Clarke2005). Attempting to critically relativize universal claims, we follow Kenneth Gergen’s line of questioning: “Who benefits and who loses in such efforts?
What are these predictions used for? Who is the knowledge empowering, and who is eliminated from view?” (Cisneros-Puebla2008, p. 41). The research team’s position within current power structures and the ethical implications of that position need to be disclosed and critically reflected upon. Reflexivity and analysis of power con-stellations relate to one’s own situation and to the way in which one’s own work is embedded and enmeshed within institutional requirements and restrictions; critical reflection on this positioning also has implications for the situation in the research area.2It should include an analysis of the research project history in order to create awareness of one’s own (and the research team’s) involvement in the requirements of institutional frameworks and power structures.
In sum, we consider the dialogic process of mutual exchange between researcher and research participant as well as between the research team and research field to be a crucial ingredient of a thorough, robust, and reflexive cultural-psychological research approach. Emerging ethical challenges mirror this co-constituting process.
The (self-) positioning of researchers in the field can never be neutral. Researchers depend on local authorities to gain access to the field and they need to gain trust and access to the various groups of actors within the field. For example, the researchers need to position themselves in relation to expectations of help from them and the status as locals or international researchers that they bring to a rural setting. Research participants may ask about social assessments and evaluations as well as push the researchers to present ways of reducing risk or ways for a community to achieve certain social or health-related goals.
5.3.1 Complexity Versus Simplicity
Birkman and Wisner (2006) have presented several challenges that arise when scholars from contrasting disciplines and paradigms conduct research on the “un-measurable” (p. 3) concept of vulnerability in the context of disasters; these include different assumptions about fundamental issues like the nature of science and what constitutes an explanation. The same problem can be said to occur with the blurry concept of culture-specific ways of coping with disasters. Different assumptions, however, can also lead to creative tensions and new insights.
Socioculturally specific forms of practice, in local history and globally intertwined economic as well as political structures and processes, contribute to the complex and fluid construct of coping. It is difficult to sort out these interacting, overlapping features in a clear manner. A historical and global perspective along with a post-modern (that is, relativistic and postcolonial) standpoint may best grasp the features related to local specificities. Instead of generalizing theories or concepts developed in the North to encompass the behavior of people in the South, this hybrid perspec-tive can account for locally specific power differentials that are historically rooted and globally intertwined. Furthermore, oversimplifications in the sense of linear, cause-and-effect assumptions are obsolete and have been replaced by complexities, differences, heterogeneities, and rather complex co-constitutions between situational elements (Clarke2005).
In contrast, policy makers, disaster-management organizers, donors, and other actors in the landscape of a specific disaster response strive for mathematical par-simony and seek relatively simple prediction models in order to mitigate negative (mental health) outcomes. Decision makers tend also to look for firm answers or clear options rather than nuanced understandings; unanimity is always preferable to looking for patterns in a diversity of meanings, responses, and goals (see Birkman and Wisner2006).
Which methodologies and research designs are best suited to answer the needs of the people most affected by a disaster when evaluating data about the effectiveness of a given or multiple, potentially overlapping responses? We argue that a community struck by a disaster cannot speak with one voice. Diverse experiences, interests, or claims (modulated by the availability of different resources due to various positions of those affected within complex power structures) require a response that accounts for polyphony. Furthermore, in studying a complex, long-term response to a disaster, it is difficult to untangle the response to the disaster itself and the response to experiencing relief efforts and their related injustices. Therefore, it is imperative to describe the phenomena from many perspectives using a plurality of data collection methods in order to describe thoroughly the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the people most affected in relation to the disaster and emerging topics such as subsequent aid-related injustice.
5.3.2 Controversies About Research Aims
Research in the context of coping with disasters ranges between the poles of 1. inductively understanding specific ways of dealing with adversity—ideally
through common discovery—and
2. deductively implementing predefined research agendas or intervention programs.
The challenge for the first approach is how to transcend initial descriptions to arrive at more in-depth understandings and how to conceptualize the relations between these reconstructed subjective experiences and actions. In relation to the second approach, ethical considerations are important such as whether informed consent is ever really achieved. Moreover, many survey methods of data collection (especially scales and questionnaires) delimit the complexity and meaning of research participants’ poten-tial responses and reduce them to responding “subjects” of the research. Especially when people become research objects, who are subjected to research in top-down research projects or interventions instead of participants and active agents, prob-lems arise. For example, social conflict can emerge when responsible authorities do not take responsibility for any long-term processes they trigger. Researchers should rather ask: “Are there not winners and losers in any intervention into the risk-scape of a locality?” (Birkmann and Wisner 2006, p. 14). In Chap. 1, we highlighted the shortcomings of such prescriptive intervention programs. The problem of preset goals, however, is partially reduced by the fact that some intervention programs are the direct outcomes of rapid assessments to gather information about requests for the programs that affected people need.
Participatory research strategies range between the two poles described above by mixing joint discovery processes with an orientation toward (preset) goals through intervention. Participatory vulnerability analysis (PVA), for example, is a systematic process that involves communities and other stakeholders in an in-depth examination of their own vulnerability, at the same time empowering or motivating them to take appropriate action (Chiwaka and Yates n.d.). A collective realization process that in-volves researchers and “co-researchers” in close communication is central (Kemmis and McTaggart2005). In this process, research participants act as collaborators in the research team. As noted by Bergold and Thomas (2012), “the common aim of these approaches is to change social reality on the basis of insights into everyday practices that are obtained by means of participatory research” (paragraph 6).
The term “participation” originates in democracy theory and thus has a norma-tive political basis. Habermas (1981) connected the idea of participation with the possibility of arriving at decisions and implementing them collectively or through appropriate delegation of authority. Accordingly, this collective process requires an analysis of and reflection upon power structures—above all, institutional ones. This does not automatically lead to overcoming (let alone eliminating) power structures, since the potential to create drastic change seldom lies within reach of those who practice participatory research. It seems possible, however, that collective reflection can expose these structures for the duration of the discursive practice and “give voice”
to those who otherwise would not be heard; of course, giving voice by itself can be na¨ıve and do harm if one fails to account for power differentials on the communal level, for example. A participatory approach enables those involved to become part of the public sphere. This can occur through performative techniques such as arts and media, which broaden the latitude for creative action and can reveal concealed shared rules (Wulf and Zirfas2001; Haseman2006; Prawitasari-Hadiyono et al.2009).
However, even if participatory research succeeds in transcending a merely de-scriptive level, it is unclear whether the reconstruction or exact understanding of subjective perspectives contributes to a better understanding of actions. According to Bourdieu (2005), an individual’s practice is determined by his or her habitus, about which he or she can give no information; the vantage point in question repre-sents a self-evident worldview of which the individual is not aware. Relationships of dominance and the assumption of positions within a social structure can belong so self-evidently to a person’s habitus or identity that their transparency or ability to be changed consciously only exists under particular circumstances. Actors can only come close to being a “subject” to the extent that they consciously control their relationship to their own dispositions (Bourdieu and Wacquant1996, p. 171). Farnell (2000) claims that Bourdieu, in his assertion that habitus is closed to consciousness, reproduces Cartesian body–mind dualism. She argues that when we see body and mind as a unity, we know more than we can communicate. Bourdieu, therefore, perpetuates the fundamental misconception of dualism by stating that thought oc-curs only in the brain, separate from bodily activities, and by assuming a lack of awareness rather than a lack of discursive facility.
Only when we presume the possibility of self-reflexivity and reasonably justified change on our own or in collective action does the feedback provided by research re-sults make sense. Moreover, we argue that through such feedback and by stimulating and supporting reflection about events and actions in the past and in relation to the future, we can inspire and document change. Researchers would not, then, bring this change into communities from the outside and impose it upon them in a prescrip-tive manner; instead, communities would generate changes themselves by becoming more aware through their involvement in the research process itself. This reflexive awareness may or may not lead to genuine and sustainable behavioral change.
The systems of values, ideas about the world, principles of conduct, shared prac-tices, relevant societal structures, and political and economic relations guide and orient people toward their worlds and symbolize a given social order without en-abling them to be fully conscious about it. This perspective helps us to understand why social change, even in the face of dramatic, unusual events—such as disasters—
may only be moderate. However, underestimating agency may be an artifact of the method, too. Research methods that are not limited to verbal communication such as performative approaches are extremely useful in this area. For example, using photographs taken by community members can facilitate expression of current, past, and future life experiences (see Lykes2001a,b).
Disasters and subsequent reconstruction efforts pose an unusual, even extraordi-nary situation in which many people reflect upon essential matters in their lives (see Schlehe2006; Oliver-Smith1998; Schwarz2012). The interview situation, either
one-on-one or in a focus group, encourages individuals to examine their experiences and actions at a greater distance. However, it is not easy for a person to reflect upon the conditions of his or her own perspective and actions. Moreover, this is true for the people who experienced the disaster, and not only for those who were there and tried to help but also for us as researchers. An assumption here is that we are limited in the extent to which we can think about why we perceive things the way we do, determine how we do things, and reflect on what leads us to act. Often, we never discover the real reasons for doing what we do but rather attribute certain motiva-tions to our acmotiva-tions post hoc. The ways in which we account for our acmotiva-tions are often subject to the demands of the current context and relate to subjective plans that are projected forward as future actions.
As strangers to a culture and as interpreters of complex data, foreign researchers probably experience greater astonishment at what they observe than interpreters do because the sociocultural context is entirely familiar to the latter. This presents a particular danger that, for example, German researchers may impose their own Western categories on what they hear and see. There is a danger also that Westerners’
own habitus-determined viewpoints and power relations, which they tend to replicate in countries of the Global South, will be concealed in reporting what they believe to have been discovered. Problems like this have led to a deep crisis in cultural anthropology, a science marked by a prior colonial history (see Clifford1988; Berg and Fuchs 1993). In psychology, recognition of these limitations has stimulated the emergence of indigenous psychologies (see Kim2000; Zaumseil2006b) and the development of a distinct research standpoint that questions the universalizing demands of the “Western” gaze in psychology. The opportunity to draw on the strength of the external gaze—without misusing its biases and entangling oneself in historical pitfalls—lies in dialogue between both foreign and local researchers as well as with those who are being researched.
5.3.3 Transferability Versus Generalizability
Cultural-psychological approaches challenge the research goal of finding universal regularities and focus instead on culturally specific features of personal and social life.
The main goal is to find meaningful categories to analyze and describe how people relate to the past, present, and future. By examining narratives and producing ana-lytically ordered descriptions of situations, cultural-psychological approaches create contextualized, ideographic knowledge rather than establishing law-like statements and predicting outcomes through the pursuit of nomothetic objectives. Developing generalizable and potentially universally applicable models is not the main research aim. Researchers first need to reconstruct, as precisely as possible, the research participant’s meaning (that is, his or her perspective) and then interpretatively de-construct the positions that this meaning and its corresponding actions represent in the situation, working in a comparative manner to produce transferable knowledge.
In making these comparisons, researchers can identify locally common viewpoints in
connection with local power relations and property ownership. Following Charmaz’s (2006) constructionist view, we do not presume to discover categories that inhere in data and an external world separate from our own. Instead, as researchers we con-struct grounded theories from interpretive interaction with the field, using constant comparative methods and developing standpoints and opportunities for engagement.
In the interpretation and comparison of cases—within the framework of grounded theory in coding and developing categories (Strauss and Corbin1990)—researchers develop theoretical connections that are closely linked to the data. Here, they can be theoretically sensitized by the various approaches to coping without directly applying theoretical propositions to the data.
When engaged in interpretive work, it is important to ask to what extent the find-ings can and should be transferred to other contexts. It is questionable to support a unified approach to any culture. Such an assumption is not tenable especially in Java, Indonesia, as many scholars have documented a formidable diversity of beliefs and ways of life on the island (above all in terms of religion, see Beatty1999for example).
Moreover, this variety seems to be undergoing a process of change. The idealized depiction of Javanese village life, with the central elements of mutual assistance (gotong royong), joint decision making (musyawarah), respect (hormat), harmony and togetherness (rukun, kebersamaan), combined with mysticism (kebatinan), has arguably served to secure the domination of those in power, and, under the national leadership of former Presidents Sukarno and Suharto, has been used to justify a state ideology, according to which peace, orderliness, and compliance were supposedly rooted in “Javanese culture” rather than in the elite’s claims to power (Antlöv2005).
Many anthropologists have contributed to this ideology, although it has subsequently been called into question by some and has been described by Pemberton (1994) as the culturalization of politics. The daily reality of village life is also characterized by tension and conflict despite dominant ideologies of harmonious village life. Concep-tions of power, subordination, and village democracy are also very diverse (Antlöv 2005). Thus, we have to understand that accounts of Java contain interests and ideal-izations that obscure points of conflict and diversity; failure to reflect upon these can hinder us in our generation of power-critical representations of post-disaster reality.
5.3.4 Epistemological Controversies
Quantitative approaches suggest a positivist or post-positivist outlook and claim ob-jectivity in presenting the research results as tangible numbers and graphs. They assume the realist position that “‘things exist only in the real world’ and, therefore, anything that cannot be observed through the senses is of no consequence” (Crowe and Shepphard2010). Validity, reliability, and generalizability are crucial for quan-titative approaches. For some scientists who take a quanquan-titative research approach, qualitative designs still tend to be deemed unreliable, compared to surveys that use representative samples with valid and reliable scales or experimental designs using randomized controlled trials.
Often, theories developed in high-income countries are assumed to be applicable elsewhere, including in middle- or low-income countries (see Kalayjian et al.2002).3 In order to avoid the nonreflective transfer of Western theories onto other cultures, cul-tural psychology needs qualitative approaches and metatheoretical reflection (Priya 2010; Cisneros-Puebla2008).
Compared to quantitative research, qualitative approaches are rather interpretative and subjective in presenting the context of the research findings. Qualitative research draws on symbolic interactionism (Mead1934; Blumer1969), which was elaborated by Strauss (1978) in research about social worlds and developed as the grounded the-ory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss1987; Strauss and Corbin1990;
Glaser 1992). Research styles and epistemologies subsumed under the label of grounded theory are diverse. We follow Charmaz (2006) and Clarke (2005) in their constructionist approach. Constructionists assume that scientific observations cannot reveal the “true” character of reality since observations are always verbally medi-ated and point to their socioculturally specific context of emergence. Glaser (1978) overemphasizes the discovery of such an “objective” world, while Strauss (1987) and Strauss and Corbin (1990) place too much emphasis on the technical-procedural aspects of analysis. Charmaz (2006), however, looks at interactions throughout the entire interpretative research process:
Your grounded theory journey relies on interaction emanating from your worldview, stand-points, and situations, arising in the research sites, developing between you and your data, emerging with your ideas, then returning back to the field—or another field, and moving on to conversations with your discipline and substantive fields. To interact at all, we make sense of our situations, appraise what occurs in them, and draw on language and culture to create meanings and frame actions. (p. 179)
Currently, there are only a few examples of constructionist disaster psychology re-search. One impressive approach has been developed by the Indian psychologist Priya (2004,2010,2012), who conducted research on the experiences of suffering and healing among the survivors of a 2001 earthquake in India. Priya (2010) de-scribes the formation of the research relationship as a tool for acquiring knowledge.
The process of gaining knowledge coincides with dynamic transformations on the part of both the researcher and the research participants, engendering a genuine co-construction. By and large, critical self-reflection (where the self is the individual researcher and the research team) is required to disentangle the constructions pro-duced by both the researchers and those being researched (see Chaps. 6–8). The viewpoints or constructions of disaster-affected persons represent their idiosyncratic experiences. At the same time, discourses and discursive practices in their sociocul-tural contexts (such as conversations with neighbors or family members, discussing newspaper stories, listening to government announcements, etc.) also shape these experiences. Using a social constructionist approach, it is possible to investigate the
3In Chap. 2, we have shown possible ethnocentric and androcentric fallacies that accompany such universalistic presumptions.
relationships between these idiosyncratic constructions and collectively shared dis-courses, norms, and practices. Individual and collective features may be in conflict or may complement each other, affirm each other, and so on.
In contrast to social constructionism, realism is based on the following assump-tion:
A distinctive feature of a realist philosophy is that ontology (the theory of being, which has strong implications for the conceptions of reality) is seen as distinct from epistemology (the theory of knowledge), which means that scientific theorising is based on the assumption that there exists a mind-independent reality. (Wikgren2004, p. 12)
Therefore, realist approaches apply quantitative methods that can validly represent
“reality”, looking for causal mechanisms in order to make appropriate—that is, objective—explanations and predictions. Meanwhile, strong versions of social con-structionism radically relativize claims of knowledge: “There are no transcendentally privileged accounts of what we take to exist” (Gergen and Gergen1997, p. 32).
Social constructionism implicitly contains an appreciation of local knowledge, a posture of reflexive deliberation toward different constructions of the world, which invites dialogue (Gergen1999). Engler (2004) shows how the different conceptions of “constructionisms vary in several ways: according to the kinds of objects or ideas analysed as constructs; by the scope and degree of relativism; along a spectrum from descriptive through normative to activist; and by a theoretical focus on contingency, nominalism or stability” (p. 296). He argues that constructionism is not necessarily antirealist. However, like Winter (2010), we believe that the role of the body in these constructions and the contribution of the material world are missing. Clarke (2005) suggested a materialist constructionism, which we concur with and extend to create what we call a sociocultural materialist constructionism. This expanded form of so-cial constructionism serves as the epistemological basis for our cultural psychology of coping with disasters (see Chap. 3).
Within this philosophical framework, we consider some universals about human nature to be valid, such as the social character of human beings. Accordingly, the social context rather than the individual should be the starting point for analysis.
This approach was developed by the cultural historic school (Vygotsky1985) and in symbolic interactionism (Mead1934). Meanings not only emerge from what is said but are also represented in the practices, material objects, ways of conduct, and (ritual) performances that researchers encounter in local contexts. Researchers have to interpret these local meanings and practices against the backdrop of social and economic structures and inequalities in power and property. In sum, we try to strike a balance between understanding the actions and meaning-making of our research participants on the one hand, and the structures of the social and material context on the other.