Social and Multicultural PsychologyDawn MenardPsych/620October 20, 2014Stacy HernandezSocial and Multicultural PsychologySocial psychology is the scientific attempt to explain how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings. The study of social influence on all the ways that people have an impact on one another. (Fiske, 2010).
In social psychology, research is a very integral and important part for many psychologists. First, they developed theories and tests to investigate how valid their advanced scientific research attempts are. They are causal, coherent, and they avoid excess in order to facilitate their investigations.
Next, social psychology depends on scientific methods for clarity and thirdly, researchers choose appropriate research strategies. What is conducted is: experimental, observational, survey research, and complying to arduous, ethical standards before researchers can make any type of assertions or assumptions about how people influence one another.
There are three types of research that are the main focus in social psychology: descriptive, correlation, and experimental research. Descriptive research depict accurately some characteristic in a population of interest. It focuses on onvariable at a time, assesses the amount or average level of a given variable in a population. (Fiske, 2010).
It concerns an atypical kind of hypothesis, raises specific issues about sampling, and addresses a unique kind of question (Fiske, 2010). Correlation research is research that investigates whether or not changes in one variable are possibly related to those changes in other variables. Experimental research is made up of 3 parts: manipulation, randomization, and control.
In comparing case-based and more accepted research approaches in psychology, it is useful to think about social research as comprising relationships between human beings. Proximity and distance enacted relationships between researchers and participants is the product of the research strategies and methods employed in a given project (Hodgetts & Stolte, p.380, 2012).
We first reconsider case study as a method, with the intention to highlight the case as so something to be explored, rather than as a tool to be applied to other things
(Radley & Chamberlain, p. 391, 2012).
Multicultural psychology is the systematic study of all aspects of human behavior as it occurs in settings where people of different cultural backgrounds encounter each other. Multicultural psychology influences contemporary psychology and its sole focus is on race and ethnicity as well as the impact it has on individual human actions. Social behavior is to a larger extent than people commonly realize, a response to people’s social context, not a function of personality (Fiske, 2010). The importance of non-presumption (and the self-definition of identity salience) becomes critical because certain kinds of diversity (e.g., sexual orientation, religion) can remain invisible if a person wishes (Fiske, 2010).
Social psychology and multicultural psychology are similar to each in some ways.
Both social and multicultural psychology defines all human beings as unique and multicultural. Culture affects individual self-definition, experience, behavior, and social interaction. It shows that both are teachable and learned. Sociology examines society, at levels from small groups, families, neighborhoods, institutions, cities, to nations. Other social sciences focus respectively on political institutions or political behavior, economic institutions or economic behavior, but all typically at a more macro level than psychology (Fiske, 2010).
What separates them is that multiculturalism uses personal identity by historical and social factors and a person’s self such as: sexual identity, gender, social class, identity,
