Cultural Orientations and the Two Dimensions of General Belongingness
Description
Abstract Whether a person prioritizes the group or the self may matter less for belonging than whether their relationships are organized around equality or hierarchy. Research relating cultural orientation to social connection has produced conflicting findings, and one source of this inconsistency may be measurement: individualism and collectivism are commonly assessed on a single axis that aggregates egalitarian and hierarchical variants, which may relate to social outcomes in opposite directions. Belongingness is likewise commonly assessed as a total score, although achieved belongingness comprises separable dimensions of acceptance and rejection. The present study disaggregated both sides of this relation. Turkish adults (N = 350; aged 18 to 45 years) completed the Individualism and Collectivism Scale and the General Belongingness Scale online. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the four-factor model of cultural orientation and the two-factor model of belongingness fit better than more parsimonious alternatives, although absolute fit was modest for the former. In multivariate multiple regression, horizontal collectivism was the only orientation associated with both dimensions, predicting higher acceptance and lower rejection, and this result held across demographic adjustment, alternative item selection, and censored-outcome estimation. Vertical individualism was negatively associated with acceptance but did not survive alternative item selection. Cultural orientations accounted for substantially more variance in acceptance than in rejection. Re-estimating the models with composite and single-axis measures reduced explained variance by roughly two thirds and eliminated the association involving individualism, offering a direct account of why prior work using unidimensional measures has reached conflicting conclusions. Keywords: general belongingness; horizontal collectivism; vertical individualism; cultural orientation; acceptance; rejection
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Institutions
- Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat ÜniversitesiAntalya, Alanya