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ISSP Position Stand: Culturally competent research and practice in sport and exercise psychology Tatiana V. Ryba a , Natalia B. Stambulova b , Gangyan Si c & Robert J. Schinke d a Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark b School of Social and Health Sciences, Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden c Sport Psychology and Monitoring Centre, Hong Kong Sports Institute, Fo Tan, Sha Tin, Hong Kong d School of Human Kinetics, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Canada Version of record first published: 03 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Tatiana V. Ryba , Natalia B. Stambulova , Gangyan Si & Robert J. Schinke (2013): ISSP Position Stand: Culturally competent research and practice in sport and exercise psychology, International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, DOI:10.1080/1612197X.2013.779812

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ISSP Position Stand: Culturally competent research and practice in sport and exercise psychology

Tatiana V. Rybaa*, Natalia B. Stambulovab, Gangyan Sic and Robert J. Schinked

aDepartment of Public Health, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; bSchool of Social and Health Sciences, Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden; cSport Psychology and Monitoring Centre, Hong Kong Sports Institute, Fo Tan, Sha Tin, Hong Kong; dSchool of Human Kinetics, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Canada

(Received 19 December 2012; final version received 22 February 2013)

The multicultural landscape of contemporary sport sets a challenge to rethink sport and exercise psychology research and practice through a culturally reflexive lens. This ISSP Position Stand provides a rigorous synthesis and engagement with existing scholarship to outline a roadmap for future work in the field. The shift to culturally competent sport and exercise psychology implies: (a) recognizing hidden ethnocentric philosophical assumptions permeating much of the current theory, research, and practice; (b) transitioning to professional ethics in which difference is seen as not inherent and fixed but as relational and fluid; and (c) focusing on meaning (instead of cause) in cross-cultural and cultural research projects, and cultural praxis work. In the paper, we first provide an overview of the concepts of cultural competence and ethics of difference. Second, we present a step-by-step approach for developing a culturally competent project rooted either within cross-cultural or cultural research. Third, we focus on cultural praxis as a project that blends theory, research, and lived culture of practice. Finally, we summarize main points in nine postulates and provide recommendations for enhancing cultural competence in the field of sport and exercise psychology.

Keywords: cross-cultural psychology; cultural psychology; cultural praxis; culturally competent researcher; culturally competent practitioner

Cultural diversity is an important challenge that is frequently encountered by sport and exercise psychology professionals. Increased globalization has fostered a wider exchange of people, objects, images, ideas, value systems, and information, which has thus changed the contemporary sporting landscape, signifying one of the most exciting and challenging movements in the globa- lized cultural field today. As Urry (2000) proposed, cultures travel with and through diverse mobi- lities, transforming social relations, people’s identities, and daily practices within and across global and local communities. Intensified border-crossing activities bring athletes, coaches, and sport psychology professionals from diverse cultural backgrounds in close contact with each other, and their individual life narratives are likely to invoke different historical memories, interpretations, and sociocultural positioning.

While sport psychology researchers do not contest that sport is a multicultural context, they often regard it from the unchallenged position of an ethnocentric (white, male, heterosexual, middle-class) way of knowing (Gill, 1994; Hall, 2001; Krane, 1996; Krane & Baird, 2005; Parham, 2005; Ryba & Schinke, 2009; Ryba & Wright, 2005; Schinke & Moore, 2011). The

© 2013 International Society of Sport Psychology

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1612197X.2013.779812

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evidence of this, following three decades of critical interventions initiated by feminist scholars in our field (see a special issue of The Sport Psychologist edited by Gill, 2001), is apparent in sport psychology research largely because it continues to be about the “universal” athlete, making readers infer participants’ background from the authors’ affiliations (for reviews, see Kamphoff, Gill, Araki, & Hammond, 2010; Ram, Starek, & Johnson, 2004). Yet, identifying athletes within broad categories constructed as oppositional binaries (male/female, straight/gay, white/“other”) is similarly problematic because everything in each category is assumed to be the same. Not only does constructed sameness subvert differences within each category, binary relationships are hier- archical, signifying that one term in the oppositional binary is dominant and normative in its meaning. This is known as “the dilemma of difference” (Manow, 1984 as cited in Scott, 1994, p. 289). Manow contended that both ignoring and emphasizing difference creates a risk of recreat- ing it in existing power relations. Therefore, a new way of thinking about athletes (and indeed sport psychology professionals) is needed—one which stresses the diversity and complexity of sport and exercise participants’ behaviours and motivations through an enhanced understanding that their experiences are always contextually contained within socially and culturally available resources to make sense of the surrounding reality, including who they are and how they relate to others.

In this position stand, the objective is to outline a conceptual framework for delineating cul- turally competent projects and the formulation of postulates, which can guide actions towards cul- turally competent research and practice in sport psychology. The following discussion consists of four parts. First, we provide a brief overview of the concepts of cultural competence and ethics of difference. Second, to contextualize our discussion in the study of culture in psychology, we present a step-by-step approach for developing a culturally competent project rooted either within cross-cultural or cultural research. Third, we focus on cultural praxis as a project that blends theory, research, and lived culture of practice. Finally, we summarize the main points and provide recommendations for enhancing cultural competence in the field of sport and exercise psychology.

Cultural competence and ethics of difference

Calls for cultural competence in psychology are not new and have been linked to concerns for effective and ethical delivery of psychological services to culturally diverse clients (e.g. Ander- sen, 1993; Butryn, 2002; Gill, 1994, 2007; Martins, Mobley, & Zizzi, 2000; Si, Duan, Li, & Jiang, 2011; Terry, 2009). Recognizing that many psychological concepts and theories stem from a Euro-American context and, therefore, carry Eurocentric cultural assumptions, the American Psychological Association (APA) developed multicultural guidelines that were adopted in 2003. The APA framework emphasized three general areas: (a) cultural awareness—understand- ing of one’s own culturally constituted beliefs, values, and attitudes; (b) cultural knowledge— understanding and knowledge of other worldviews; and (c) cultural skills—use of culturally appropriate communication and interventions. The guidelines conceptualize cultural competence within the American discourse of mental health stressing that service providers (including service agencies and organizations) should focus on “the client within his or her cultural context, using culturally appropriate assessment tools, and having a broad repertoire of interventions” (Ameri- can Psychological Association, 2003, p. 390). Summarizing multicultural perspectives in pro- fessional practice, Martin and Vaughn (2007) referred to cultural competence as the ability to recognize difference and interact effectively with people of different cultures.

In our field, the theoretical, methodological, and political engagement with issues of sociocul- tural difference, identity, power, reflexivity, and praxis has become visible primarily due to ongoing, dedicated work of critical scholars. The publication of Schinke and Hanrahan’s

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(2009) edited text, Cultural sport psychology, might be considered evidence that cultural sport and exercise psychology is a recognized area. Ryba, Schinke, and Tenenbaum’s (2010) edited volume, The cultural turn in sport psychology, is based on a critical cultural studies approach to challenge readers to examine culture in all areas of sport and exercise psychology. Responding to that challenge, the edited collection of Stambulova and Ryba (2013a), Athletes’ Careers Across Cultures, examines athlete career research through a theoretical lens of the cultural turn, exploring how social and cultural discourses within and across national boundaries shape career develop- ment and assistance. In professional practice of sport psychology, Parham’s (2005) efforts in developing multicultural guidelines as well as Andersen’s (2005, also Gilbourne & Andersen, 2011) and Gill’s (1994, 2007) critical reflections on sport psychology supervision and service pro- vision should be acknowledged. The Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology special issue (Schinke & Moore, 2011) on culturally informed sport psychology is a recent example of the ongoing debates over definitions and models of cultural competence, further highlighting challenges and controversies not only in various philosophical aspects of the concept, but also in progressing from a definition to the delivery of a culturally competent research and practice.

Stemming from the aforementioned groundwork1 and drawing further on the ISSP Competen- cies Position Stand (Tenenbaum, Papaioannou, & Samulski, 2003), we consider competency as encompassing both the process and the outcome of meeting a certain expected level in the domain’s knowledge base and practice standards. The knowledge base comprises theories; research methodologies; measurement, assessment, and interpretation; and ethics. The practice standards include interventions and communications. We suggest approaching areas of compe- tence identified by Tenenbaum et al. as the sites of critical scholarly engagement, through which researchers and practitioners can probe into the invisibility of ethnocentric assumptions that structure everyday sport and exercise psychology practices. By increasing their analytical ability to recognize philosophical assumptions underpinning research traditions in psychology while considering their own sociocultural constitution and positioning, sport and exercise psy- chology professionals will be better equipped to develop a culturally competent project. There- fore, we see our main task in unearthing the hidden philosophical assumptions, which permeate much of the current theory, research, and practice in sport and exercise psychology.

Inherent in our task are ethical considerations to illuminate power relations operating through the construction of difference in Eurocentric discourses, in which whiteness “can be interpreted as encompassing non-material and fluid dominant norms and boundaries” (Garner, 2007, p. 67). Jean Pettifor, a leading author on professional ethics and feminist practice in international psy- chology, urged psychologists to recognize power and politics as forces that determine ethical be- haviour. She argued that ethical principles should be viewed as values within a particular social and cultural context, warning against imposing one’s own ethical standards on the rest of the world (Pettifor, 1996, 2001, 2004). When difference is constructed as inherent and fixed, it is often done on the basis of racist and/or ethnocentric discourses (Weedon, 2004). However, differ- ence can also be constructed as relational, constituted, and fluid. As Brah (1996) astutely argued, “it is a contextually contingent question whether difference pans out as inequity, exploitation and oppression or as egalitarianism, diversity and democratic forms of political agency” (p. 126, orig- inal emphasis). In this Position Stand, we advocate for addressing cultural difference as a form of ethical and moral engagement with collective and individual subjectivities that do not yet share the privileged sociocultural space of dominant discourses.

Culture as a scientific paradigm

In this section, we take a crude paradigmatic approach to the study of culture in our discussion of the shift in psychology from an emphasis on cause to one on meaning, as reflected in

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theoretical and methodological lines of enquiry in cross-cultural and cultural psychology research. While we do not ground cultural competence within a specific paradigm, we believe culturally competent researchers and practitioners should be able to understand different assumptions underpinning cross-cultural and cultural psychology, respectively. Hence, we suggest that a culturally competent project can be designed as a cross-cultural study, a cultural study, and cultural praxis.

The Kuhnian concept of the paradigm as “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners” (Kuhn, 1962, p. viii) has also been explained as universally accepted theory about how the world works. The- ories are embedded in a particular view of the social world providing a structure as to how we understand certain phenomena and relationships. If we believe that an objective perception of reality is theoretically possible, then employing a model or framework that maps the world as it really is, and which offers an explanation of the laws of human behaviour would be intuitively appropriate. In contrast, if we hold a position that knowledge of the world is fragmented, rela- tional, and situated, then we approach theory as a cultural artefact that offers an insight into the meaning system, which allows us to make situated knowledge claims. As Kuhn elucidated, shared assumptions and standards for scientific practice are necessary for the continuation of a particular research tradition.

Cross-cultural psychological studies operate within a positivist epistemological paradigm employing modernist theories to derive and test research hypotheses. Positivism is a philoso- phical stance that assumes the independent existence of an objective reality that can be revealed by means of careful and bias-free observation. Hence, for cross-cultural researchers culture is an external entity, “theorized as an independent variable and assumed to influence the psychological functioning of individuals” (O’Dell, de Abreu, & O’Toole, 2004, p. 138). Culture is used to indicate some type of belonging to a group, usually based on a geographical location or linguistic identification, and is used further as a basis for comparing psychological aspects of performance across national samples. This is known as an etic perspective on culture (Ponterotto, 2005).

Cultural psychology was launched in response to the dissatisfaction with the ontological universalism and decontextualized methodology of cross-cultural studies. The main concern of cultural psychology is with how culture underpins the psychological processes and is embedded in socio-historical contexts (Miller, 2002). Hence, for cultural researchers, there is no separation between subject and context as they “live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up” (Shweder, 1990, p. 1). Given the theorized interdependence of psychological and sociocultural, mental processes and beha- viours are not merely influenced, but constituted by varied cultural discourses and material practices. Cultural psychologists take a cultural insider perspective, known as the emic view of culture, emphasizing the importance of language, communication, relational perspectives, cultural practices and meanings, beliefs, and values in human development. The focus of cul- tural research, therefore, is on the interpretive analysis of culture in search of meaning (Geertz, 1973), using theory as a fluid heuristic (rather than a fixed model) through which individual experiences can be interpreted.

Next we explicate the paradigmatic differences in cross-cultural and cultural psychology by presenting a step-by-step approach to developing a culturally competent sport psychology project rooted either within cross-cultural or cultural research. Within each design, we briefly explain the research goals; how culture is studied, described, and interpreted; and researcher axio- logical positioning. We also provide a research example to bring to life some of the conceptual and methodological arguments.

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Cross-cultural research

Research goals

Cross-cultural psychology can be regarded as the testing of “the boundaries of knowledge about human behaviour by comparing it in two or more cultures” (Matsumoto & Jones, 2009, p. 323). In cross-cultural research, the systematic comparison of psychological variables under different cul- tural conditions is performed in order to “determine the limits within which general psychological theories do hold, and the kinds of modifications of these theories that are needed to make them universal” (Triandis, Malpass, & Davidson, 1973, p. 1). Such definition gives a clear goal for cross-cultural research in psychology (see also Spering, 2001).

How do we study culture in cross-cultural psychology?

Cross-cultural studies are typically quantitative in design. As stated by Van de Vijver and Leung (1997), there are four common types of cross-cultural studies as follows: (a) generalizable (i.e. with hypothesis, but no contextual consideration); (b) theory-driven (with both specific hypoth- esis and contextual consideration); (c) psychologically differentiable (with neither hypothesis nor contextual consideration); and (d) externally valid (with no hypothesis, but contextual consider- ation exists). Across all four types of studies, there is always an issue of borrowing/adapting the questionnaire or psychological instrument across cultures. Standard procedure of instrument adaptation, psychometric validation and interpretation is described next.

Translation methodology. Based on the revision of Brislin, Lonner, and Thorndike (1973) and International Test Commission (ITC, 2010) Guidelines, Ægisdóttir, Gerstein, and Cinarbas (2008) summarized recommended translation practices. Relevant, sequenced recommendations from that summary for this position stand—regarding the borrowing of instruments from one culture to another—are extracted as follows. There should be: (1) independent translation from two or more persons familiar with the target language, culture, and intent of the instrument; (2) documen- tation of comparisons of translations and agreement on the best translation; (3) rewriting of trans- lated items to fit the grammatical structure of the target language; (4) independent back-translations of translated versions into the original language; (5) comparison of original and back-translated ver- sions, focusing on appropriateness, clarity, and meaning; (6) changes to the translated version based on comparison until satisfactory; and (7) pre-testing of translated instruments on an independent sample (e.g. N = 10) to check for clarity, appropriateness, and meaning for each item.

Analysis (preliminary and equivalence). Cronbach’s alpha reliability, item-total scale corre- lations, and item means and variation indicate the initial psychometric properties of translated instruments (Ægisdóttir et al., 2008). A significant difference in reliability coefficients between two independent samples may indicate item or construct bias. Item-total correlation may indicate construct bias (e.g. differential social desirability and differential familiarity with instrumenta- tion). Although these issues are more related to cross-cultural comparisons, researchers/prac- titioners are recommended to beware of them when borrowing instruments.

Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, multidimensional scaling techniques, and cluster analysis can be used to investigate construct and measurement-unit equivalence of trans- lated instruments (Van de Vijver & Leung, 1997). These methods help the researcher to see if the construct is structurally and meaningfully similar in both target and original cultures. It is always difficult to establish full scalar equivalence. Van de Vijver and Leung suggested that full score comparability, intra-cultural validation (i.e. comparison with theoretical expectation), and

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cross-cultural validation are three main approaches of establishing scalar equivalence and are important even for researchers/practitioners not interested in cross-cultural comparison, because researchers may rely on the theory/model/structure developed from original culture to interpret the data collected in the targeted culture.

How do we describe culture? (Interpretation)

When full equivalence and bias are established, the translated instruments can be employed with the assumption that the construct, which is being tested, is similar to the originally designed con- ceptualization. It is, however, quite difficult to establish completed scalar equivalence. Therefore, researchers/practitioners are recommended to be aware of the possible covariates or meaning of the relevant constructs within the targeted culture, and to conduct “unpackaging studies” that examine the degree to which the context variables statistically account for the group differences found in the data by mediation or covariance analyses (Matsumoto & Jones, 2009). Different cut- off points and norms may also be needed for better interpretation. To make interpretation practi- cally meaningful, researchers are recommended to engage in effect size statistics in addition to inferential analyses, such as ANOVA, chi-square, and t-tests. In a broader perspective, researchers should be aware of the way they operationalize cultures. There can be statistical group differences due to operationalizing culture as race or nation, for example. Such misinterpretation of statistical group difference may lead to the cultural attribution fallacy (Matsumoto & Jones, 2009). Ideally, researchers are recommended to engage with cultural informants from the outset of the project to avoid cultural bias when interpreting research findings. Additional information can be found in the ITC (2010) guidelines for documentation and score interpretation.

Researcher positioning/ethics

There are several ethical issues associated with conducting cross-cultural psychology research, which should be considered in addition to standard ethical research practices (e.g. obtaining informed consent and ensuring participant confidentiality). One of the key principles is that the studies should not be used to vindicate powerful stereotypes about any cultural group (Matsumoto & Jones, 2009). Researchers should consider whether their research question is worthy enough of pursuing in terms of research relevancy and contribution towards understanding human behav- iour. Finally, researchers must avoid actions, procedures, and interactive styles that may violate local customs and understandings of the studied community.

Cross-cultural sport psychology research example

To exemplify cross-cultural sport psychology research, we will use the European Perspectives on Athletic Retirement Project aimed at searching for common and also nation-specific patterns in career termination and post-career adaptation of former elite athletes from Germany, Lithuania, Russia, France, and Sweden (Alfermann, Stambulova, & Zemaityte, 2004; Stambulova, Stephan, & Jäphag, 2007). Two project leaders (lead authors of the two aforementioned refer- ences) began the research endeavour by discussing its general idea and relevant theoretical frame- works amongst themselves. Because the project leaders were from different cultures and had different sport psychology scientific training, it was not an easy task to select one framework for developing an instrument. The compromise was found through combining two internationally recognized transition models (Schlossberg, 1981; Taylor & Ogilvie, 1994) and the authors’ own theorizing on the topic (Alfermann, 2000; Stambulova, 1994) as the basis for developing the Ath- letic Retirement Survey (ARS). The basic version of the ARS was created in English and then

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translated into relevant languages using to-and-from translation assisted by language experts. Translated versions were piloted in the involved countries and relevant cultural adaptations were made. For example, Russian participants were confused with the term “guest marriage” and, therefore, this marital status option was deleted in the Russian version. Further discussions were led around culturally relevant meanings of the ARS items. For example, in Sweden, “civil marriage” (called “sambo” or literally “co-living”) is legally recognized as marriage, while in Russia “civil marriage” is unofficial and in the case of separation it is very difficult to solve pro- blems regarding division of joint possessions.

After creating national versions of the ARS, the researchers explored the culturally relevant ways of data collection to get higher return rates. It appeared that pos

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