Studying Form and Meaning Across Cultures Posted on January 7, 2008 Kenneth H. Rubin (bio) examined different cultural takes on behavior in a longitudinal study in China.

One of the things that I’ve become very interested in, and I was interested in earlier, is the difference between form and meaning. And by form I mean what does a given behavior look like, and by meaning it’s what does that behavior mean? And it varies from culture to culture, so you can have one given behavior that’s interpreted through very different lenses, cultural lenses. And so that’s where I began my international collaborations.

We started with work in China, and that began after an international meeting of ISSPD, a workshop with senior Chinese scholars after the cultural revolution, so in the late 1980s. And I ran into some very young scholars, none of whom had PhDs because at the time the Chinese government and the country didn’t offer a PhD in anything at the time, and invited one particular person to come work with me in Waterloo in Canada, and that generated a whole program of international research.

And here’s basically what we did: At the time I was involved in a longitudinal study with a colleague by the name of Shelley Hymel, and she and I were following a group of kids from kindergarten right through 9th grade. And we were interested in a phenomenon that really didn’t have very much appeal to the North American audience.

At the time it was sort of the heyday of studying acceptance and rejection in the peer group, and the going-in position was the way you get rejected is to act out. If you’re aggressive, if you’re obnoxious, whatever, you become rejected by your peers. And our position was that if you are socially anxious and withdrawn, if you remove yourself from the social community for whatever reason, then it will bear some negative costs.

So that’s the line of research we were doing, and when this young scholar came in from China to do his PhD with me, I said, “Here’s my research grant. Why don’t we replicate it in Shanghai?” And obviously couldn’t do a full replication, but he started doing a replication of that work.

And the initial finding, which was again about form and meaning, was that this phenomenon that we were discovering was associated with rejection and predicting rejection and predicting loneliness and depression and anxiety did not have the same consequences or correlates in the People’s Republic of China.

In fact, shy, anxious kids were not seen as being atypical, but rather as compliant, well-mannered, reserved, obedient, and they ended up looking rather popular rather than rejected in the peer group. So over the course of time we followed those kids, about six or seven years, actually, and made discoveries that as China was changing, the correlates and concomitants of this phenomenon began to change as well.

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