Cultural Psychology of Relationality: Implications for Eldercare

Abstract

Standard ideas about relationality in mainstream psychological sciences reflect engagement with cultural ecologies of neoliberal individualism that afford a sense of freedom from constraint and abstraction from context. These cultural ecologies afford an understanding of love in terms of emotionality and an expansion-oriented approach to relationship as a site for personal fulfillment via mutual exploration. The implicit contrast is with the cultural ecologies of embedded interdependence. These cultural ecologies afford an understanding of love in terms of materiality and a careful approach to relationship that emphasizes management of existing connections. Against this background, I conducted three studies that explored cultural-ecological variation in understanding about love (as emotional or material care) and the implications of this cultural-ecological variation for eldercare beliefs among people in West African and US settings. In Study 1, tendencies to understand love as material care (versus emotional care) and to prefer home integration (versus institutionalization) were more evident among interview participants in West African (Nigerian and Ghanaian) settings than US settings. Study 2 not only replicated these patterns among questionnaire respondents in Nigerian and US (both African American and European American) settings, but also provided evidence for the hypothesized negative relationship of relational mobility with materiality and the hypothesized positive relationship of materiality (but not emotionality) with home integration and relationship harmony. In Studies 3A and 3B, I manipulated experience of mobility and embeddedness and observed hypothesized effects such that tendencies associated with materiality of care were greater in the embeddedness condition than the mobility condition. Results illuminate cultural-ecological variation in understanding of love and implications for eldercare beliefs.