Qiang Culture Identity And Resilience

Resilience refers to a psychological development phenomenon in which an individual, was/is in adversity, has not mentally and physically influenced by unfavorable experiences. It’s, for any individual, a psychological trait, ability and adaptability to quickly rebound to a previous good condition in the face of any life hardship,difficulties, threats, trauma or other pressures. Resilience has been considered to be one of the influential factors and has been studied from such different angles as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological resilience, pressure, post traumatic development and happiness, etc., in the massive researches on earthquake stricken masses’psychology and behavior after the Wenchuan Earthquake on May12,2008. And few investigations have been done to discuss about the characteristics and the influential factors of the resilience. When the Wenchuan Earthquake happened on May12,2008, the Qiang Nationality habitation was a heavy earthquake stricken area, where nearly30,000people of the Qiang Nationality lost their lives or missed, and lots of cultural treasures were ruthlessly destroyed. After the earthquake, lots of researches have been conducted on the culture of the Qiang Nationality, mainly focusing on the textual research on the historical development, the protection and the continuity, and the social functions of the Qiang culture,but few research on Qiang culture perceivers’ psychology and behavior. The cultural psychological study puts the cultural context at the first place as the starting point and the end of researching, and researching in the specific cultural context. Therefore, the ethnic cultural factors should be taken into account in research of resilience after the earthquake. This paper, therefore, combining the quantitative and qualitative research, from a perspective of cultural identity, tries to conduct a detailed investigation into the resilience of the Qiang people in such aspects as the characteristics and influential factors after the earthquake, while hoping to seek for theoretical supports from the cognitive science.This research has been done with the following steps:A documental overview has been done to see what have been done in the same field and to find out what can be done in this research; A questionnaire has been designed to find out necessary information about the ethnic culture and national culture identity of the Qiang people, based on the previous research; A primary analysis of the questionnaire mentioned above has been done to find out the characteristics on cultural identity of the Qiang people, and a series of researches have been done to explore into the characteristics and influential factors of their resilience, and building the model of influential factors about resilience of Qiang people, trying to find out the supports from their self report inventory; An IAT has been done to retest the structural characteristics of the Qiang people’s cultural identity, trying to find out the evidences from their implicit behaviors; With the method of House-Tree-Person (H-T-P), a projective test has been done to find out the characteristics and differences of the resilience in different tested subjects; A test has been done to find out the subjects’ characteristics of their attentional and memory bias in order to seek for the theoretical supports from the cognitive science; A case study has been done to explore the relations between the Qiang people’s cultural identity and resilience in order to find out evidences from the individuals. All the7researches mentioned above, including14sub-researching projects, are of multi-dimension, of multi-methods and lead to the following main conclusions:(1) A questionnaire, conducted respectively in two weeks, one year and three years after the earthquake to survey the mental health and the coping styles among the adolescent and adult in the heavy earthquake stricken area, shows that there are significant decreased in adverse psychosomatic reactions after one year. There are significant differences in mental health and coping style on gender and nationality, such as boys get higher scores than girls in problem solving, and girls get higher scores than boys in the sensitive, self-blame, retionalization.An investigation, conducted three years postearthquake found that the youth suffer more posttraumatic mental health problems than the adult, the male suffer more than the female do, and the higher education a subject, the less posttraumatic mental health problems he has, and comparatively the Qiang people suffer less than the Han people do. A qualitative research of resilience conducted among12Qiang adults three years postearthquake with Nvivo10.0. Related coding and data analyzing leads to a structuremodel which consists of four second order factors, including four dimensions as the source of trauma, coping style, resilience, and subjective well-being.(2) Based on the preliminary investigation, open questionnaire, and literature review, two questionnaires have been designed to find out the Qiang cultural identity and the Han cultural identity respectively. With good reliability and validity, these two questionnaires can be employed as researching tools in the further researches. A factor analysis shows that the Qiang cultural identity consists of three second order factors, including six first order dimensions as the sense of ethnic belonging, the ethnic cultural cognition, the preference for ethnic things, ethnic acceptance, the ethnic religion beliefs, and the ethnic social conventions.The three second order dimensions as Qiang cultural symbols identity, Qiang cultural status identity and Qiang cultural value identity. The Han cultural identity consists of three first order factors, including three dimensions as the identification of Han cultural values, Han cultural symbols, and Han cultural status.(3) The characteristics of the Qiang people’s cultural identity can be concluded as the following:Generally, the Qiang people have a higher degree in the acceptance of the Qiang cultures than that of the Han cultures, with the highest score in the Qiang cultural status identity and the lowest score in the Han cultural symbols identity. The Qiang and the Han cultural identities have significant different in age, occupation, education, being the only child in the family or not, the family members, and the friends of the Han. Based on their different attitudes towards the Qiang cultures and the Han cultures, Qiang people’s cultural identity have been classified in the following four groups:those accept both two cultures in higher degree (38%); those accept both two cultures in lower degree (30.1%); those accept Qiang culture in higher degree but accept Han culture in lower degree (11%); and those accept Han culture in higher degree but accept Qiang culture in lower degree (20.9%).(4) There are significant differences in the resilience of subjects who have different cultural identities. Generally, those who accept both two cultures (integration) make good scores in whole resilience, toughness, strength, and optimism, while decreasing scores have successively been made by those who accept Han culture in higher degree, but accept Qiang culture in lower degree (assimilation), by those who accept Qiang culture in higher degree, but accept Han culture in lower degree (separation), and by those who accept both two culture in lower degree (maginalization). (5) A significant correlation exists between the cultural identity and resilience and such factors as the Big Five Personality, the spirit beliefs, the perceived social supports, the coping styles, and the general well-being. A regression analysis shows above factors play some different roles in resilience respectively. A influencing factors model indicated that significant positive prediction in resilience by Qiang cultural identity and Han cultural identity through personality, having a rate of interpretation of73%, and through the spirit beliefs, having a rate of interpretation of50%, and through the coping styles, having a rate of interpretation of26%.(6) An implicit association test (IAT) among61subjects of the Qiang people found that a significant effect exist in their implicit cultural identity.61subjects have a positive attitudes towards their ethnic cultures, inclining to classify the Qiang cultures with the positive words, while to classify the Han cultures with the negative words. The test result indicated that the explicit and implicit cultural indentity of the Qiang people belong to relatively independent structures, not being influenced by the subjects’age, sex and education.(7) The score of the Qiang people made in the test about their perception of the mainstream culture is above the average. Their perception of the mainstream culture and life satisfaction do have a relation with the explicit cultural indentity, but not with the implicit cultural indentity.(8) A House-Tree-Person projective test has been done among44subjects of the Qiang people and found that significant differences in drawing characteristics exist in different cultural identity groups. And, there is high relationship between drawing characteristics and resilience. An analysis of the drawing characteristics and the resilience shows that those who accept both two cultures present more positive attitudes and emotions, while those who accept two culture in lower degree present more press, anxiety, lack of security, retraction and over reliance in interpersonal relations. These results proved that there is different resilience in different cultural identity at implicit level.(9) A behavior experiment found that differences attentional bias to threatening stimuli related to the earthquake in different cultural identity groups. Those who accept both two cultures responded lest to the threatening stimuli, while those who accept two cultural in lower degree responded most to the threatening stimuli. And different cultural identity groups also have different memory bias to the threatening stimuli related to the earthquake. Those accept two cultures in lower degree responded longer time in recognition the earthquake pictures are influenced more by the threatening stimuli. Conversely, those who accept both cultures in higher degree responded lest time and lest influenced by the threatening stimuli. Such a result provides evidence from cognitive processing to explore the relation between the Qiang people’s cultural identities and their resiliences.(10) A case study has been done among9Qiang people from a perspective of qualitative research to narrate the driving effect on the resilience by Qiang cultural identity, taking the three cultural identity groups.Jointly using the methods for quantitive and qualitative research, this study has put forward and testified the three second order factors model for Qiang cultural identity and the three first order factors model for Han cultural identity.Then established a structure model to discuss about the influential factors that have impacts on the resilience of the Qiang people, and testified the difference characteristics of different cultural identity groups from their implicit behaviors and cognitive processing as well. Further studies shall be done in such fields as the cross-cultural research on resilience, and neural physiological mechanism research on it. Applied research to expand the scope of the researches on Qiang culture, and discussion about the relation between the ethnic culture and the individual’s psychological and behavior development.