Special issue - Psychology in a global world: Locally relevant... but globally ignored?
Carl Martin Allwood discusses some of the practical problems with taking an indigenous approach.
18 February 2005
We would all like our work to be relevant and useful to society, and psychology is fulfilling at least some of its promise in this respect. But the way psychology is going about realising its true potential is changing. Most mainstream psychology has been of Western origin, following a universalist mode that aims to formulate powerful empirical regularities valid for most, or all, of humankind. Indigenous psychologies (mostly non-Western approaches) tend to be conducted in a more local mode. But are these two extremes of the research continuum quite as far apart as they seem, and which is best for the future of the discipline?
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