Cross-cultural analysis Of elementary school children's values and perceptions of support systems
Description
Multicultural psychologists have discussed the growing concern over ecological validity in understanding children’s mental health: insufficient participatory efforts to incorporate marginalized perspectives have led to a subsequent lack of inclusive, culturally sensitive definitions of support and support systems. The phenomenology around experiences, beliefs and perceptions is an integral component in describing support and support systems, where the composition and content of support systems depend on context and culture. Using archival qualitative research data from focus groups and ecomaps conducted with elementary school-aged children across 9 of the 14 international sites in the Promoting Psychological Well¬-Being Globally (PPWBG) project (Nastasi & Borja, 2016), the present research used children’s voices in identifying contextually-relevant sources of support, as well as patterns across 9 of the 14 sites. The present research was a part of a multi-method study, serving as a secondary analysis to triangulate (across two methods) previously analyzed data elicited from the focus groups (Borja et al., 2016) and ecomap tool (Borja et al., 2017). The goal of triangulation was to examine for consistent themes related to support and enhance the credibility of the combined tools’ ability to elicit data around support. The triangulation yielded 33 codes related to systems of support for psychological well-being¬. A thematic analysis condensed the codes into 5 broad themes: Financial/Material Support, Emotional Support, Social Support, Recreational Activities and Academic Support. These themes were salient across the nine sites. Ultimately, the five themes were either identified as being possibly global or context-specific, which may be useful in future research to inform practice and instrument development.