Culture, causal attribution, and social support-seeking in Asian college students

2012-07-26Research suggests that when stressed, Asians tend to seek social support less frequently than European American populations. At present, it is unclear how culture might be associated with social support-seeking behavior, particularly among Asian groups who differ in their orientation towards individualistic or collectivistic values. Therefore, the study explored how Asian college students’ cultural orientation would be associated with their use of social support and their causal attribution of stress. The study manipulated cultural orientation in 176 Asian and Asian American college students (142 females, 23 males; M = 19.86 years, SD = 1.28). Participants were randomly assigned to either an individualistic or collectivistic priming condition and then asked to 1.) evaluate the extent to which they attributed cause of a hypothetical academic failure to internal factors and blamed themselves for the situation, and 2.) indicate the strategies they would use to cope with the stressor. No group differences were found for social support, causal attribution, and self-blame by condition. Further analyses revealed that the priming effect varied by cultural identification. Bicultural-identified participants primed with collectivistic values had lower scores for social support than those primed with individualistic values. Asian-identified participants had higher scores for causal attribution and lower scores for self-blame compared to Western-identified participants. These results suggest that cultural orientation was associated with social support-seeking behavior and that collectivistic-oriented individuals attributed cause to external factors and blamed themselves less than individualistic-oriented individuals