Case Study on Cultural Differences

Cultural differences can pose problems for health care workers. In the case of Linda Gorman, she is faced with the decision to report a woman for child abuse, or chalk it up to cultural differences. The question shouldn’t be whether or not she should report Mrs. Saeto, but rather, are Mrs. Saeto’s actions really considered child abuse? The answer to this can get muddled in cultural beliefs. For Americans, her actions qualify as abusive because Mrs. Saeto is unnecessarily causing harm to baby Marie by burning her. To the Mien culture, this is merely an act of protecting the child and curing her from an ailment. It really depends on what viewpoint one looks at it from. In the Mien culture, practices like this burning ritual are commonplace. The Mien culture believes in spirits and rituals that can cure ailments. To some outside of the culture, these practices may seem barbaric, but to them, some of American practices may seem barbaric as well. For example, Linda mentions the differences between burning a child and causing a child pain by giving them a shot. Both cause the baby to cry, and to both cultures, both are considered to be helping the baby stay healthy. To anyone outside of the American culture, American medical practices can potentially seem just as barbaric as burning a baby. This is directly related to cultural relativity, or “the view that practices and behaviors can be judged only by the cultural standards of the culture in which those practices occur,” (Hachen, n.d.). According to David Hachen, “rejecting cultural relativity implies that there are universal standards by which the practices in all cultures can be evaluated,” (Hachen, n.d.). If Linda assumes that Mrs. Saeto’s beliefs are barbaric and should be reported, she is practicing ethnocentrism, or “the view that one’s own culture is the superior culture and therefore its standards are the ‘universal’ ones that should be used to judge behaviors in all cultures,” (Hachen, n.d.). Linda needs to

References: Hachen, D.S. (n.d.). Instructor 's Manual to accompany Sociology in Action: Cases for Critical and Sociological Thinking. Retrieved June 13, 2013, from http://www3.nd.edu/~dhachen/page6/page8/files/im-final.pdf