Etic and Emic

Etic and emic approaches are two divergent cultural perspectives in studying psychology across cultures and ethnic groups. The etic approach, derived from the linguistic term phonetic, develops psychological models that are generalized across diverse groups. In the initial stage of cross-cultural psychology, theories and practice in clinical and abnormal psychology are meant to cover core similarities in all human behaviors and are assumed to be transferable to all cultures. As a reaction to the dominance of the etic approach, psychologists in some non-Western cultures started the indigenization movement in cultural psychology. The emic approach, derived from phonemic in linguistics, attempts to identify local realities and focus on culture-specific meaning of abnormal behaviors and indigenous clinical responses. It requires researchers or practitioners to take the perspectives ...