An ecological approach to the study of resilience, informed by Systems Theory and emphasizing predictable relationships between risk and protective factors, circular causality, and transactional processes, is inadequate to account for the diversity of people's experiences of resilience. In contrast, a constructionist interpretation of resilience…

This article addresses the role of culture in breast cancer screening behavior among African American, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian American/Pacific Islander, and Hispanic/Latina women. It reviews cultural beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge and their relative influence on women's decisions regarding health tests. The article explores how…

Misunderstandings and breakdowns in communication often occur when we interact with people from different cultures. Therefore, it is essential for us to be sensitive to other cultures. This article analyses the prevailing problems in intercultural communication and gives suggestions to higher education institutions in the hope of improving…

Four hundred eighty six university students completed a confidential questionnaire designed to assess a multitude of aspects of their current and past dating relationships. The 24-item questionnaire was designed to highlight the prevalence and rate that individuals were involved in intercouple relationships; these being interfaith, intercultural,…

Joy A. Fowler, Department Chair, Writing Department, School for Creative and Performing Arts, Ohio talks about his courses offered at his school, theories and learning used, interdisciplinary opportunities available at his school and other related matters. Talking about cultural and linguistic diversity he says that as it is observed that writing…

The spontaneous utterances produced by 492 Cantonese-speaking children aged 36-60 months in 30-minute toy play contexts were collected. The incidence and percentage of different lexical classes, the ratio of noun and verb types and tokens were calculated. A statistically significant predominance of verb usage was found in the expressive utterances…

This study was designed to examine associations between family relationship quality and friendship quality in the United States and Japan using surveys of representative samples of individuals ranging in age from 13 to 93 in the United States (n = 1498) and Japan (n = 1641). Associations between family relationships and friendships were stronger…

The authors of this article are engaged in co-writing a book that explores art, culture and education. We come from different cultural backgrounds (Pakeha and Maori), from different art disciplines (theatre and sculpture) and from two different trainings in knowledge. As we get deeper and deeper into the project we find that the collaborative…

This article deals with two main topics: the interplay of iconicity and metaphors in signed language discourse and the relevance of sociocultural knowledge for a full understanding of LIS metaphors. In metaphors, the iconic features of signs play a role in the creative process of determining a mental fit between two different domains. Iconicity…

This article describes a contrastive study on rhetorical differences between Italian and English sales promotion letters. It is assumed that cultural differences affect discourse genres traditionally considered as standardized, ritual or even formulaic, written business communication being a case in point. It was our goal to investigate how…

This article presents the results of an exploratory empirical study into the perception of conventionally indirect requests in British English and Peninsular Spanish, given the high incidence of the pragmatic category over others in its encoding of politeness in both related and unrelated languages (cf. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). More specifically,…

Cross-cultural comparisons of categorization often confound cultural factors with expertise. This paper reports four experiments on the conceptual behavior of Native American and majority-culture fish experts. The two groups live in the same general area and engage in essentially the same set of fishing-related behaviors. Nonetheless, cultural…

Teachers are probably the main group of professionals with whom school psychologists have most contact. Teachers are usually involved in making referrals of individual children, they may be expected to act on the advice of the school psychologist and they also work with school psychologists in consultation-based activities. It is therefore…

This article will discuss the use of technology with young children to strengthen cultural connections. A brief discussion of the use of technology in the field of Early Childhood Education and a brief discussion of diversity and cultural issues is followed by specific ways in which technology can be utilized to help young children understand…

This paper discusses cultural barriers in educational assessment by comparing Japanese and German school report cards. The discussions on assessment fluctuate between two intellectual extremes: objectified selection or educational diagnosis. In Japan, many teachers make written comments on school report cards with ambiguous expressions to avoid…