Cross Cultural Competencies 1 Cross-Cultural Interview & Written Report Haji Bibi 21F_EDU4354_010 Cross-Cultural Competencies Professor Barbara Leigh Golden Algonquin College, Ottawa, ON October 14, 2021 Cross Cultural Competencies 2 A. Overview: I took an Afghani family interview who have been in Canada for the last ten years. The family in my apartment prefers to call me for the interview due to covid and not meeting in person. Afghan family is a strictly socialist family whose family's interest is top priority before one's interests. They believe in the combined multigeneration family and are interdependent with each other. Usually, women are in charge of the domestic chores, raising the children, entertaining guests, catering to the man's needs, and ensuring guests are appropriately entertained and catered to in the most hospitable way the household can afford. The men tend to be home, and men carry the family's economic burden and support the entire household. The eldest male has a significant role in decision-making, getting approval for domestic matters, and controlling household expenditures. The Afghan families are shocked when women need to go to work to meet the family's needs. They found it challenging to work with men in an open society by keeping their distance from another gender. The second problem they found hard was how people tell you directly to improve the work performance, but they were not used to in their culture because they think somebody is challenging your task performance. Another cultural hindrance is still present that they disregard genuine love and dating for the teenagers. They strictly believe in arranged marriages. A couple's attraction to each other is not always an important consideration. In Afghan culture, a woman can only leave the house if she has a male accompaniment and is completely protected ( Burqa) from the public eye. Canada being a democratic and diverse society, all citizen has right to express and conduct their cultural customs freely. But they find it hard to convince their male family that they want to dress up as Canadian and live like them. That is why most Afghan girls ran away from home and got married to Canadians, and that girl is no anymore part of her family according to their culture. She is out of her family forever, and as a woman's slipup can bring intense shame on her family. Young girls can sometimes be married off to a debtor to satisfy a family debt. B. Analysis about Culture Cross Cultural Competencies 3 Afghan culture seems to be non-flexible and has strong faith in their culture, customs, and ethnicity. Afghans generally have a strong sense of personal honour and are highly aware of their community's opinion of them. Hospitality, loyalty, and modesty are highly valued. However, Afghan culture and daily life have been significantly impacted by constant conflict. Resilience is now an essential quality that has become implanted within the Afghan character because of these experiences. Afghans have a strong sense of loyalty for their relatives, tribe, or ethnicity than their national identity. Afghans' awareness of their honor influences much social behaviour. 'Honor' in this sense includes an individual's reputation, respect, and value. Protection of integrity and community opinion is often at the front of people's minds. It influences people to behave cautiously following social expectations to avoid drawing attention to themselves or risk doing something perceived to be dishonorable. As members of a shared society, most Afghans consider a person's behaviour to reflect the family, tribe, or ethnicity to which they belong. Thus, when a person's behaviour is perceived to be dishonorable, their family shares the shame. When the disgraceful behaviour occurs outside of a person's community, other Afghans can often quickly implicate that person's ethnic group, tribe and religion as the cause of their behaviour. As a result, Afghans can be cautious that they need to give a general impression of self-respect and truthfulness to protect the honour of those they are associated with. To prevent indignity, criticism is rarely given directly, and praise is expected to be generously offered. The senior male of a family is considered to be responsible for protecting the honour of the family. They are often mainly concerned with the behaviour of the women in their family, as females have many social expectations to comply with. These relate to their moral code, dress, social interactions, education, economic activity, and public involvement. A violation of social obedience by a woman can be perceived as a failure on the man's behalf (her father, husband, or Cross Cultural Competencies 4 brother) to protect her from doing so. Informal gatherings, men and women are separated. Male and female roles are strongly differentiated. The public sphere is the domain of men, and the domestic one is the realm of women. Women have never participated publicly in decision-making processes. They are admonished to be modest and obey the orders of their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Marriage is considered an obligation and a prominent source of entertainment and family celebration events. Women now must be covered entirely by a long veil and accompanied by a male relative when they leave the house. Women face overwhelming obstacles if they seek to work or study or obtain access to primary health care. However, the Taliban have improved security in many rural areas, allowing women to carry out their everyday duties. Social stratification is expressed primarily through marriage patterns, and the general tendency is for lower social groups to give their daughters in marriage to higher social groups. C. Refection The interview went very well. My opinion about Afghan culture is optimistic and pessimistic, too, as long the strict and rigid cultural norms are concerned. It will take time to be positive and to accept the new cultural experiences as citizens. When refugees and immigrants come to Canada, they should be exposed to a new country's culture and history to perceive newly faced cultural stories and information about the new culture. Families are revealed to various seminars, sessions, and intellectual talks about expected changes in a new culture. I wonder if I would ask how we could open and favour contemporary culture and take whatever is best for you and avoid what is not. In future, I would keep in mind while interviewing a cross-cultural person to ask some of these questions and know their opinion. Cultural shocks can be minimized by exposing the families to cultural events and customs and knowing the importance of the new cultural values. We must respect any culture as it is their culture, just like ours. As long the new culture is not physically harmful to or discriminating anyone's Cross Cultural Competencies 5 cultural norms and values. All diverse cultures are respected, valued, and protected by law, and we all citizens are the same benefits as native citizens. We must be loyal to the new country and its worked hard of our best capacity to make the new nation the best. We can uncover the family to children's, families, and community's, love, care, respect, respecting people's opinion, respect for freedom, guiding children to obey the country's law, and many more through which this country has become the country of opportunities for immigrants. One cannot impose their cultural belief and traditions, and customs on anyone forcefully, and everyone has the right to live life peacefully. Culture harmonization is essential to be prosperous and healthy development of new generation in a new country. The children will be confused with the cultural differences that will create tension and depression in the family, and they might be frustrated with their way of living and the people around them. Interview Guide: The purpose of the interview guide is that an interviewer should have a clear understanding and diverse ways of looking in terms of cross-cultural context. We must reflect on how much knowing and unknowing in a diverse culture can affect an interview process. Interviews guide will provide us with windows to view various failures to connect well across cultures. We must adopt the universalist approach of emphasizing the similarities among peoples and ignoring their differences. That is, we learned to interview people in the same way regardless of their specific culture. At first, it might seem that we are treating people more fairly if we interview all of them in the same way. We cannot miss cultural differences that mark people as individuals, such as personalities, dreams, age, gender, sexual orientation, and personal history. We overemphasize culture to reject other factors; we risk treating some people as if they're unusual or stereotypical. We should learn about the interviewee's culture. At the same time, we should consider each person's individuality without being disadvantaged by oversimplified stereotypes. When we use a multicultural approach to interviewing, we see people both as individuals and members of cultures. We see individuals within the context of their cultures and know that this enhances our work. But we don't need to disown all Cross Cultural Competencies 6 we have learned about interviewing. As interviewees, we are cultural beings, and we bring our habits, preferences, and worldviews into our interviews. We must focus on building the interview relationship: establishing rapport and conveying respect, concentrating on the early parts of an interview. With the proper preparation before an interview and the correct orientation at the beginning, we need to prepare for an interview, the information that needs to be gathered beforehand, who should be invited to participate, and other initial decisions. We must have a relationship by focusing on nonverbal communication: avoiding offending in the way you use your body in interviews and interpreting the interviewee's nonverbal signals. The interviewer follows guidelines concerning confidentiality, but interviewees are usually free to reveal to others as much as they want about what transpired. We should have background knowledge of addresses interviewing people who have a different native language from the one used in the interview. It discusses some research on memory and feelings when people speak in their native language versus a language they acquired later, and ways interviewers can achieve the best possible results when speaking with someone whose native language is different. Information flows primarily in one direction from the interviewee to the interviewer. Indeed, many interviewers take advantage of the situation to inform the interviewee about services available or processes and procedures that might follow from the discussion. However, the primary purpose of the interview is to gather information from the interviewee—some of the most common misunderstandings that occur in cross-cultural interviews and ways to avoid these. The "Afterword" offers further encouragement and professional development suggestions for those working to become more culturally competent as interviewers. Interview Guide Questionnaire Afghan culture Q.1. how do you define family in Afghan culture? Q.2. Who is included in your family system? Q.3. How often do you go with family for entertainment? Q.4. How did you find celebrating vacation in Canada? Q.5. How do you celebrate events and vacations with family? Q.6. How does your culture treat a pregnant woman? Q.7. How was your experience as a pregnant woman in Canada? Q.8. Where do women tend to give birth? Q.9. What is your cultural perception about giving birth, and how did you find the Canadian culture of delivery? Cross Cultural Competencies Q.10. How was your experience of friendship as a teenager? Q.11. Does your culture appreciate teen love and dating? Q.12. How did you find the Canadian culture of boy and girl friendship? Q.13. How do you see your teen children's love and dating future as Canadian? Q.14. Do you have a culture or have an experience of going to the beach for sunbathing? Q.15. How was your first reaction when you went on the beach? Q.16. Do you often like to go to the beach? Q.17. Do you find any shocking stories new to Canadian culture, and why do you think it is surprising? Q.18. How do you communicate with elders, younger children and even parents in your culture? Q.19. Did you find any difference in communication style in Canadian society? Q.20. What did you like in Canadian culture which you do not like in your culture? Q.21. Any Canadian custom, culture, and practice you adopt to harmonize with, but you are not willing to embrace that? Q.22. Was there any desire or wish you could not get it, and you could get it in Canada? Q.23. Any event or cultural custom you participated in, and you repent of being Canada for not participating? 7 Cross Cultural Competencies 8 Cross Cultural Competencies References https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/fontes2.pdf?t https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/afghan-culture/afghan-culture-core-concepts https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/afghan-culture/afghan-culture-family 9
