Psychological interventions and assessments

Abstract

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Psychology deals with the scientific study of behaviour in different settings such as clinical, occupational, industrial, educational. In every setting culture would be expected to play a role in the behaviour and how it is understood by those who are observing this behaviour. Within clinical psychology, there are several specialties related to age, e.g. child and adolescent, or setting, e.g. forensic. The influence of culture is fairly universal but the interpretations of these cultural influences become relativist. Psychological interventions are affected by the context within which they are developed and their blind application across cultures without understanding the contextual setting therefore becomes problematic. Kazarian identifies three major periods in the cultural history of psychology. These are construction of the culture of psychology, deconstruction of the psychology culture and reconstruction of the culture of psychology. From the nineteenth century the first period of construction of the culture of psychology used positivism, the scientific method and the quantitative analytic approach to understand the relationship between mind, environment and behaviour. As a scientific professional discipline, psychology emerged in Western Europe and North America. Within this period, psychology embedded the text and the measurement technology and also took a significant role in the development and empirical evaluation of non-medical therapeutic approaches which were humane, ethical, innovative and grounded in scientific theory. The period of deconstruction of the culture of psychology commenced in the 1960s and lasted for three decades. In this period, questions were raised about the nature of psychology, its functions and its ethnocentric origins.

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