Culture Collaboratory
Stephanie A. Fryberg, Ph.D.

CURRENT RESEARCH

CURRENT RESEARCH

Social Representations of Self and Identity

Individuals use common social representations (images, narratives, stereotypes) in the process of understanding self and social identities. Social representations supply organization and structure to the world. They come from institutions, social structures, and everyday artifacts (e.g., schools, churches, social movements, teams, families, popular culture, media and the law). They are reflections of reality, but they also create reality by affording certain perceptions and constraining others. While individuals can resist and contest the social representations of the groups with which they are associated, they cannot live outside of them.

Cultural Models of Education

Most theories of educational attainment locate the source of differential academic performance in individual factors like ability and motivation. A cultural models approach draws attention to the tacit networks of representations and understandings about education that provide structure, meaning, and coherence to individual actions in education relevant domains. Cultural models both illuminate cultural differences in psychological phenomena and make them easier to understand and predict. For example, the repertoire of meanings that are relevant to education for American Indians include representations reflecting the idea that schooling can mean separation from family, that others do not expect or believe one will do well, and that succeeding in school is a relational activity. Such representations are not prominent features of the cultural context for other mainstream American groups (i.e., middle class European Americans), and thus may be overlooked in our understandings of American Indian students? educational experiences and may help to explain the underperformance of American Indians in this domain.

Identity Motivated Health

When social representations of race are made salient, being healthy and engaging in health promotion behaviors can become markers of one's racial identity. If media campaigns represent being healthy as a "white" thing to do or perhaps as not an American Indian or African American thing to do, then when race becomes salient, being healthy becomes a "not-me" activity for non-whites. Consequently, we argue that the "healthy and white" or "unhealthy and non-white" representations prevalent in the media can inadvertently work against healthy choices by those not identified with the mainstream majority.

 

 

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