Review of Handbook of multicultural perspectives on stress and coping.

PAUL T.P. WONG and LILIAN C.J. WONG (Eds.) Handbook of Multicultural Perspectives on Stress and Coping New York: Springer, 2006, 636 pages (ISBN: 0-387-26236-9, C$89.95 Hardcover) Reviewed by ANDREW G. RYDER, DONALD H. WATANABE, and ANGELA J. RING A major, but unavoidable, disadvantage to cross-cultural psychological research is its complexity. Human nature allows for an incredible range of psychological and cultural diversity; combining these two domains leads to a bewildering array of concepts, theories, hypotheses, and research findings. It is easy for us to secretly envy at times our colleagues who can act as though the universality of their constructs is assumed beyond question. At the same time, there has been a growing recognition that a science of human behaviour that ignores humans in interaction, or behaviour in context, will, at best, provide us with the indigenous psychology of Western culture. Paul and Lilian Wong's edited Handbook of Multicultural Perspectives on Stress and Coping does not shy away from the challenges inherent in cross-cultural work. In their opening chapter, they establish quickly that they are setting out to do more than simply compare cultures on established markers of stress and coping. In addition, perhaps primarily, they wish to broaden our very ideas of what stress and coping actually are by taking seriously the ways in which these concepts are understood in different cultures. Particularly welcome in this regard is the full consideration of religious, spiritual, and existential modes of coping, modes that are extremely common throughout the world - and probably more common in "the West" than is commonly acknowledged by largely secular psychologists. Following the introductory chapter, the first section deals with a range of theoretical issues. Chapters 2, 3, and 7 provide good coverage of relevant theory, although there is considerable overlap. Chapters 4 and 5 are particularly interesting reviews of Buddhist and Taoist coping, whereas Chapter 6 provides a more general treatment of religious and spiritual coping. It is unfortunate that only a few traditions are represented and, in fact, one could easily imagine an entire book detailing notions of stress and coping from a variety of religious and spiritual perspectives. Chapter 8, in contrast, made for a confusing read. Complicated, but potentially valuable, ideas on a "biosocioexistential model of posttraumatic responses" were buried under unusually difficult prose. As some of the other chapters also suffered from unclear writing, and even from frequent typographical errors, the reader gets the sense that more editorial control and intervention would have helped considerably. The first two chapters of the second section, on methodological issues, provide a valuable overview of problems specific to cross-cultural research. Chapter 9 describes general cross-cultural issues such as measurement equivalence, translation, and scale development, whereas Chapter 10 examines problems with the use of self-report stress and coping scales across cultures. Wong and colleagues contribute Chapter 10, a particularly long (60+ pages), but valuable look at the Coping Schema Inventory. This chapter could easily have been divided into two or even three parts. The first part provides a thorough review of the coping literature, including a critique of existing coping scales. Inclusion of this material as a separate chapter near the beginning of the book might have helped reduce overlap throughout. The authors then describe the resource-congruent model of effective coping, another potential stand-alone chapter. Much of the remaining material consists of a meticulously described three-stage research program, presented at a much greater level of detail than most of the other chapters. The third section opens with a concise review by John Berry, the leading acculturation researcher, on acculturative stress. He presents his acculturation framework at a culture-general level, setting the stage for the specific examples that follow. …