Food, culture, and identity in multicultural societies: Insights from Singapore.

The choice of food practices can be influenced by one's identity in many societies, but has mostly been evaluated in light of the maintenance of cultural identity in migrant populations. This study focused on understanding the influence of identity on food practices among individuals in multicultural societies. We conducted 18 focus group discussions (n = 130) among Indian, Chinese and Malay women in Singapore. Focus group transcripts were analysed using Thematic Analysis both inductively and deductively. Deductive analysis was framed within a Social Representations Approach, a social psychological theory that allows a deeper understanding of the contextual aspects of identity. Participants highlighted the central position of food in social events, cultural celebrations, and persistent traditional beliefs about health (such as 'hot-cold balance'). These beliefs extended to the perception of certain traditional foods possessing medicinal properties. Importantly, the consumption of these traditional foods was accepted as necessary for the maintenance of health by the women. We propose that while cultural food practices are integral to identity preservation and identity continuity for Singaporean women from all three racial groups, this is different to other multicultural societies such as Canada where communities preserve their cultural food practices, in part, due to fear of cultural identity loss. In addition, cross-cultural food practices are readily adopted in participants' daily lives for a number of reasons such as the promotion of health, convenience, and variety. At times, this adoption blurred boundaries between different cultural cuisines. Food practices in multicultural societies like Singapore are thus a reflection of everyday multiculturalism, multicultural social policies, and attitudes towards traditional healthful food practices, and these aspects need to be considered in the development of public health policies and interventions.

Impossible decision? An investigation of risk trade-offs in the intensive care unit.

In the intensive care unit (ICU), clinicians must often make risk trade-offs on patient care. For example, on deciding whether to discharge a patient before they have fully recovered in order to create a bed for another, sicker, patient. When misjudged, these decisions can negatively influence patient outcomes: yet it can be difficult, if not impossible, for clinicians to evaluate with certainty the safest course of action. Using a vignette-based interview methodology, a naturalistic decision-making approach was utilised to study this phenomena. The decision preferences of ICU clinicians (n = 24) for two common risk trade-off scenarios were investigated. Qualitative analysis revealed the sample of clinicians to reach different, and sometimes oppositional, decision preferences. These practice variations emerged from differing analyses of risk, how decisions were 'framed' (e.g. philosophies on care), past experiences, and perceptions of group and organisational norms. Implications for patient safety and clinical decision-making are discussed. Practitioner Summary: Physicians managing ICUs have to make rapid decisions with incomplete information and suboptimal resources. A qualitative vignette-based interview study examined how such decisions are made. We found physicians used a heterogeneous mixture of risk assessments, factual knowledge and prior experience to make judgements, which leads to potential for inconsistent decision-making.

The role of women in food provision and food choice decision-making in Singapore: a case study.

As countries develop economically and increasing numbers of women enter the workforce, children are partly being cared for by someone other than their mother. Little is known about the impact of this shift in child-care provider on children's nutrition. This study presents findings from a case study of Singapore, a small country that has experienced phenomenal economic growth. Focus groups were conducted with 130 women of varying educational levels and ethnicities to learn about food decisions in their families. The findings showed that Singaporean working women cook infrequently, families eat out frequently, and children exert considerable influence on food choices. Implications for work-family policies and child health are discussed.

"Sometimes they'll tell me what they want": family and inter-generational food preferences in the food decisions of Singaporean women.

This study examines responses to questions regarding food choices and decisions from 18 focus groups of women (n=130) age 30-55 years living in Singapore. Focusing on the responses to the questions in the interview protocol closely associated with decision making identified several themes. Food choices and eating decisions are composite phenomenon. These composite food decisions reflect flexible, open systems we refer to here as idiosyncratic regimes in which environmental, social, and intra-personal streams of influence are prioritized as individuals generate possible food decisions. Food decisions represent the imagined and actual presence of the "family" and differing inter-generational food preferences. As women attempt to create harmony from the diversity of food preferences they generate idiosyncratic regimes of food and eating reflecting "triadic streams of influence" manifest in the context of everyday contingencies of family and individual life. Recent concern in Singapore on the part of the Health Promotion Board and the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore regarding the increasing prevalence of diet-related diseases and obesity among Singaporeans provided the impetus for conducting this qualitative study of food and eating among Singaporean women.

Precarious engagements and the politics of knowledge production: Listening to calls for reorienting hegemonic social psychology.

In this paper, we invite psychologists to reflect on and recognize how knowledge is produced in the field of social psychology. Engaging with the work of decolonial, liberation and critical psychology scholars, we provide a six-point lens on precarity that facilitates a deeper understanding of knowledge production in hegemonic social psychology and academia at large. We conceptualize knowledge (re)production in psychology as five interdependent 'cogs' within the neoliberal machinery of academia, which cannot be viewed in isolation; (1) its epistemological foundations rooted in coloniality, (2) the methods and standards it uses to understand human thoughts, feelings and behaviours, (3) the documentation of its knowledge, (4) the dissemination of its knowledge and (5) the universalization of psychological theories. With this paper we also claim our space in academia as early career researchers of colour who inhabit the margins of hegemonic social psychology. We join scholars around the world in calling for a much-needed disciplinary shift that centres solutions to the many forms of violence that are inflicted upon marginalized members of the global majority. To conclude, we offer four political-personal intentions for the reorientation for the discipline of hegemonic social psychology with the aim to disrupt the politics of knowledge production and eradicate precarity.

Towards a social psychology of precarity.

This article introduces the special issue 'Towards a Social Psychology of Precarity' that develops an orienting lens for social psychologists' engagement with the concept. As guest editors of the special issue, we provide a thematic overview of how 'precarity' is being conceptualized throughout the social sciences, before distilling the nine contributions to the special issue. In so doing, we trace the ways in which social psychologists are (dis)engaging with the concept of precarity, yet too, explore how precarity constitutes, and is embedded within, the discipline itself. Resisting disciplinary decadence, we collectively explore what a social psychology of precarity could be, and view working with/in precarity as fundamental to addressing broader calls for the social responsiveness of the discipline. The contributing papers, which are methodologically pluralistic and provide rich conceptualisations of precarity, challenge reductionist individualist understandings of suffering and coping and extend social science theorizations on precarity. They also highlight the ways in which social psychology remains complicit in perpetuating different forms of precarity, for both communities and academics. We propose future directions for the social psychological study of precarity through four reflexive questions that we encourage scholars to engage with so that we may both work with/in, and intervene against, 'the precarious'.

The Endurance and Contestations of Colonial Constructions of Race Among Malaysians and Singaporeans.

Psychological literature on race has discussed in depth how racial identities are dialogically constructed and context dependent. However, racial identity construction is often not compared across different socio-political contexts. By researching racial identity construction in three different multicultural countries, Malaysia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, we examined how three racial identities, Chinese, Malay, and Indian, are constructed among Malaysians and Singaporeans in this qualitative study comprised of 10 focus group discussions (N = 39). We applied Dialogical Analysis to the data. This paper shows that both racial ingroups and outgroups constructed all three racial identities, with ingroups constructing their identities more heterogeneously compared to outgroups. Participants also engaged with colonial constructions of the three racial identities. The geographical locations, and therefore their perceptual contexts, of the participants differed. Yet, colonial constructions of race endured in contemporary identity construction and were contested in the group settings. We conclude that the socio-political context as understood by the context of colonialism and post-coloniality influenced their racial identity constructions. Participants, regardless of differences in geographical location, used similar colonial constructions of Malay, Chinese, and Indian identities to position themselves as well as Others in their group interactions. These findings show that there is value in conceptualising the context beyond that which individuals are immediately presented with, and that psychologists should consider the inclusion of cultural legacies of colonialism in their conceptualisation of the present context.

Practice constraints, behavioral problems, and dementia care: primary care physicians' perspectives.

OBJECTIVES: To examine how practice constraints contribute to barriers in the health care of persons with dementia and their families, particularly with respect to behavioral aspects of care. DESIGN: Cross-sectional qualitative interview study of primary care physicians. SETTING: Physicians' offices. PARTICIPANTS: Forty primary care physicians in Northern California. MEASUREMENTS: Open-ended interviews lasted 30-60 minutes and were structured by an interview guide covering clinician background and practice setting, clinical care of a particular patient, and general approach to managing patients with AD or dementia. Interviews were transcribed and themes reflecting constraints of practice were identified through a systematic coding process. RESULTS: Recurring themes (i.e., those present in > or = 25% of physician interviews) included insufficient time, difficulty in accessing and communicating with specialists, low reimbursement, poor connections with community social service agencies, and lack of interdisciplinary teams. Physician narratives suggest that these constraints may lead to delayed detection of behavior problems, "reactive" as opposed to proactive management of dementia, and increased reliance on pharmacological rather than psychosocial approaches. CONCLUSION: Physicians often feel challenged in caring for dementia patients, particularly those who are more behaviorally complex, because of time and reimbursement constraints as well as other perceived barriers. Our results suggest that more effective educational interventions (for families and physicians) and broader structural changes are needed to better meet the needs of the elderly with dementia and their families now and in the future. Without these changes, dementia care is likely to continue to fall short.

Group Dynamics in Automatic Imitation.

Imitation-matching the configural body movements of another individual-plays a crucial part in social interaction. We investigated whether automatic imitation is not only influenced by who we imitate (ingroup vs. outgroup member) but also by the nature of an expected interaction situation (competitive vs. cooperative). In line with assumptions from Social Identity Theory), we predicted that both social group membership and the expected situation impact on the level of automatic imitation. We adopted a 2 (group membership target: ingroup, outgroup) x 2 (situation: cooperative, competitive) design. The dependent variable was the degree to which participants imitated the target in a reaction time automatic imitation task. 99 female students from two British Universities participated. We found a significant two-way interaction on the imitation effect. When interacting in expectation of cooperation, imitation was stronger for an ingroup target compared to an outgroup target. However, this was not the case in the competitive condition where imitation did not differ between ingroup and outgroup target. This demonstrates that the goal structure of an expected interaction will determine the extent to which intergroup relations influence imitation, supporting a social identity approach.

The researcher as experimental subject: using self-experimentation to access experiences, understand social phenomena, and stimulate reflexivity.

The current article argues that researcher-as-subject self-experimentation can provide valuable insight and systematic knowledge to social psychologists. This approach, the modus operandi of experimental psychology when the field was in its infancy, has been largely eclipsed by an almost exclusive focus on participant-as-subject other-experimentation. Drawing from the non-experimental first-person traditions of autoethnography, participant observation, and phenomenology, we argue that participating as both observer and subject within one's own social psychological experiment affords researchers at least three potential benefits: (1) access to "social qualia," that is, the subjective experience of social phenomena; (2) improved mental models of social phenomena, potentially stimulating new research questions; and (3) an enhanced ability to be reflexive about the given experiment. To support our position, we provide first-person self-reflections from researchers who have self-experimented with transformed social interactions involving Milgram's cyranoid method. We close by offering guidelines on how one might approach self-experimentation, and discuss a variety of first-person perspective ethnographic technologies that can be incorporated into the practice.