Answer these five questions and then look for the answers in the text below.
1. Which country has the highest percentage of psychologists per million of population?
Netherlands Argentina USA Slovenia
2. Which correlation coefficient describes the relationship between GNP and number of psychologists per million of population?
0.14 0.44 0.61 −0.14
3. Which country came bottom in a recent survey of national numbers of psychologists per million of population?
China Uganda New Zealand Romania
4. What percentage of psychological researchers operating worldwide is estimated to be from North America?
40 52 64 99
5. Which city boasts the world’s highest number of psychoanalysts?
Buenos Aires London New York Beijing
The whereabouts of psychology’s practitioners
It seems that your place of residence may influence your chances of becoming a professional psychologist. In 1985 the US had 23 times as many academic psychologists working in universities as Britain had, and 234 times as many as Nigeria (Moghaddam, 1987). But the global distribution of psychologists is in flux and not entirely predictable.
Textbooks
Relative representation of US/European/‘other’ research in typical psychology textbooks is estimated at 80%/18%/2% (Smith & Bond, 1998). The same authors reviewed the regional distribution of citations in several popular social psychology textbooks; in Baron and Byrne (1994) and Myers (1996) proportions of references to studies from outside the US were 6% and 8% respectively. For books published outside the US this regional over-representation was less pronounced but still present.
Hewstone et al.’s (1996) European and Hogg and Vaughan’s (1995) Australasian texts had 25% of non-US citations, with less than 3% from the developing world.
This situation is also seen in textbooks produced for a non-US readership. One Spanish textbook published in 1989 had 74% of its studies based in North America (Rodriguez & Seoane, 1989), and an edited volume entitled Psychology and the Developing World featured 3/21 contributions from that region (Carr & Schumaker, 1996). In the field of developmental psychology it has been suggested that research samples featured in mainstream texts are drawn from representatives of only 5% of the global population (Zukow, 1989a). Furthermore, a look through the references in Berry et al.’s Cross- Cultural Psychology (2002) textbook shows that (excluding those pertaining to the authors’ own research) there are 94 books from North America; 24 from the UK; nine from France; seven from The Netherlands; four each from Canada and Switzerland; two each from South Africa and Hong Kong; and one each from the Czech Republic, Germany and Australia.
As an interesting point of comparison, it was found that textbooks on the natural sciences published in the US had a higher proportion of citations for ‘foreign’ research (44%) than was the norm for psychology books (Stevens & Gielen, 2007). A consequence of the over-proliferation of US texts and citations in global psychology books is that students in many nations find themselves using American texts which inevitably carry a culturally constructed outlook (Stevens & Gielen, 2007).
Journal articles
There are approximately 1500 peer-reviewed psychology-related academic journals and 17% of them are published in a language other than English (Pawlik & Rosenzweig, 2000). Only 5% of articles in PsycINFO (the most widely used online psychology database, set up by the American Psychiatric Association) appear in languages other than English. The trend towards the marginalisation of non- English-language journal publications is set to continue, with many, especially introductory and general, publications opting for an English-only format. The danger here is an alienation of a potentially large global readership (Pawlik & Rosenzweig, 2000).
Against this it has been suggested that while US authors remain overwhelmingly the highest contributors of articles, the extent of this dominance is in decline. Bauserman (1997) found a 16% drop in the proportion of US articles featured in PsychLIT (a CD-ROM database of research abstracts) between 1975 and 1997. Adair et al. (2002) found 55% of PsychLIT articles to be from the US, which supports the declining dominance suggested by Bauserman (Stevens & Gielen, 2007).
Figure 4.1 Is there culture bias in psychology books and articles?
Before reading on, try the reflective exercise on p. 63. You may be sur- prised by some of the answers (all of which appear in the next few paragraphs).
It is estimated that around 40% of the world’s 1 million or so psycho- logists practise in the US (Hogan, 1995; Pawlik & Rosenzweig, 2000) and that as many as 64% of psychological researchers operating worldwide are North American (Rozensweig, 1999). There are approximately 290,000 trained psychologists in Western Europe, compared with 277,000 employed in the US (Tikkanen, 2004). Yet the extent of the US hegemony may be in decline in relation to psycho- logical personnel, and it is likely that this US dominance will recede in coming decades (Stevens & Gielen, 2007).
Psychology’s own globalisation is under way. There has been a recent upsurge in the number of psychologists across Spain, Israel, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina (Stevens & Wedding, 2004). In terms of the number of licensed psychologists, Buenos Aires is actually psy- chology’s world capital (Klappenbach, 2004), though the accent here and in much of the developing world is on psychoanalysis rather than experimental research. Interestingly though, the US still has around 25 times as many psychologists as China does, with just a quarter of its population (Stevens & Gielen, 2007).
We should be wise to note that the reliability of these figures suffers somewhat from regionally differing definitions of (and qualifications necessary to become) a ‘psychologist’. A master’s or PhD qualification is a requirement in some nations, though not others, for chartered psychologist status. Such vagaries notwithstanding, the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS) (1998) surveyed the number of psychologists per million of population in 32 nations. League leaders in this respect were the Netherlands (1290 per million), Argentina (1069), Finland (843), Portugal (816) and Spain (758), while the US was eighth overall (664). Fewest psychologists per million were found in China (2.9) and Uganda (4.7), with several other nations outside West- ern Europe and North America also towards the foot of the table. A concentration of psychologists in nations with higher levels of eco- nomic wealth (measured by Gross National Product (GNP) per capita) and more affluent lifestyles (measured by the Human Development Index (HDI)) is also reflected in significant correlations between the number of psychologists per million of population and both GNP (0.44) and HDI (0.51) (Fu & Jing, 1994). These associations suggest that for less affluent nations, training in fields such as agriculture, medicine and commerce is a higher priority than the training of psychologists (Pawlik
& Rosenzweig, 2000).
So what do all these figures about psychology publishing and prac- tice across continents tell us about its regional concentration? Well, clearly the US remains the world leader in terms of publishing, resources and personnel. But it is emerging that the discipline is now a global phenomenon. True, you are still more likely to learn about psychology from textbooks and journals that draw heavily on US research. But in terms of where in the world you are likely to practise psychology, opportunity appears to be knocking across five continents for both researchers and applied work. Indeed, as we will learn later in this chapter, the research interests of psychologists are becoming increasingly international and sensitive to indigenous questions about behaviour and experience.
Etics, emics and ethnocentrism in psychological research
Questions about psychology’s ethnocentrism cannot be reduced to a numbers game in which cultural bias is judged according to the con- centration of publishers and researchers in a particular region. If ethnocentrism is present in psychology it will manifest itself in how researchers go about their business, not just in their whereabouts.
There are many ways to conduct global research. Some are more open to accusations of ethnocentrism than others are. The question of culture bias in global research has been considered with the aid of two concepts borrowed from the field of linguistics: phonetics and phonem- ics (shown here as a key concept). These concepts have long been seen as analogous to two alternative approaches to carrying out