Asian Americans Less Likely to Seek Social Support

December 11, 2006

University of California had offered a research on Asian Americans. This research is done by few scholars. David K. Sherman, assistant professor of psychology at UCSB. He oversaw the research project in collaboration with Heejung S. Kim, also assistant professor of psychology at UCSB, and Shelley E. Taylor, professor of psychology at UCLA. Deborah Ko, a social psychology graduate student at UCSB also participated in the research. The project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Human and Social Dynamics program and is published in the December issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. If you want to access to the full text of Article please don’t hesitate going through the link.
This research showed that Asian Americans comparing to Americans of European extraction are less likely seek social support. The reason goes back to the culture. Although Asians have collective culture and are very depended to each other, this research showed the opposite. To clarify the whole idea of the research I will define the tow terms.
The collective culture is that member of the group are bounded to one another emotionally and the group's goal is the primary goal for each person.
The individual culture that suits for Europeans is that individual's freedom to act, think and decide is not depended t the group.
This research suggested that European Americans are more likely to seek social support as a proactive method of solving problems. This is by the way that Asian Americans believed that seeking social support will worsen the problems, burdening others, disrupting the harmony of the group and bringing shame to oneself or one's family. Asian Americans showed that bringing personal problem to the attention of others will make inappropriate demands on the group. Asian Americans also were more eager to spend their times with family rather than for their personal issues. While Europeans were more likely to individualistic matter rather than family.
This research is articulating the strong ingroup relation of Asian Americans. This strong sense of together ness makes Asian immigrants to feel more at home. Like Iranian's neighborhood in loss Angeles. They have Iranian restaurants, Iranians breads and other Iranians customs that helped them for feel more at home. There are lots of Iranians organizations all over U.S that
Or like Chinese neighborhoods. I think these communities that are based on Asian origin can help the immigrants to besides having American nationality still insist on original background of them. This is what makes them not to lean on social support that much.