Individuality and ignorance

One problem with studying your own culture is that you take a lot for granted. It's hard to challenge assumptions that you hold as truths, question patterns that you have learned your whole life, see things through the eyes of a stranger. That's what anthropology tries to teach us, but often we need help seeing the "other," especially when they are us.

Nathan interviews a number of foreign students and asks about their perceptions of American college students. Some common themes emerge:

1. American students have superficial friendships. That is, they are close to a small number of people, and very friendly with a large number of people, but in a superficial way. They are not close with their families, and rarely socialize with parents or introduce friends to their parents.

2.There is a casual informality to meeting people and it seems to be easy for them to do it, but they rarely follow up with invitations, phone calls, etc.

3. American students are isolated from world events and news, geography, and other languages and cultures. They are taught to believe that the US is at the center of everything, and that what is important about world events is the US role in those events.

4. There is a large degree of individuality among American students. One Japanese student observed that this is what makes it easy for them to do group work (because no one cares about how their involvement affects the rest of the group).

5. There is a reluctance to get to know the international students, and the questions that do get asked are naive and ill informed.

Qualitative Research Students: How do you answer these charges?

Think about these questions: How many students did she interview? In what context did she interview them? What kinds of questions did she ask? Was she leading the interview toward these outcomes (can you tell?)?