What is Culture?
Let's look at a quote by Michael Iwama. Iwama wrote, “Culture is at the core of occupational therapy and should compel all occupational therapist to consider its integral nature and place within all facets of this great profession.” It is a really strong quote that Iwama is saying here and that culture engulfs everything that we do as occupational therapists. At the same time when you talk to a lot of OTs, they are not thinking about culture the way that Iwama would describe it here.
Definition of Culture
In order to understand how culture affects occupational therapy and how we could use this both in assessment and in our treatment planning and throughout our treatments, we first have to look at the definition of culture. Several definitions of culture sound very similar in what they are describing. We have a standard general definition of culture: The totality of socially transmitted behavioral patterns, arts, beliefs, values, customs, life ways and all other products of human work and thought characteristics of a population or people that guide their world view and decision-making.
When we look at culture, there are some common characteristics that apply here. Most cultures will have a common ideology. They share common beliefs and values within them. Culture in itself will designate insiders from outsiders, i.e. who belongs to this culture versus who does not belong to this culture. In many ways culture is transgenerational. However, as we look further into this, culture does not have to be transgenerational from an occupational therapy standpoint because our definition of culture is a little different. The occupational therapy practice framework (OTPF) is defining culture within a cultural context. We define this in the OTPF as customs, beliefs, activity patterns, behavior standards, and expectations accepted by the society of which the client is a member. The cultural context influences the client’s identity in their activity choices.
The OTPF definition of culture has expanded from what we saw with the prior definition of culture where we look at now occupation and the keyword, there being those activity choices at the end. The practice framework goes on to identify how culture can have an influence on three different levels: on a personal level, on a group level and on a population level. An example of on a personal level might be a grandmother baking cookies for her grandchildren. That might be part of this grandmother and then within her family this culture that they have. On a group level, we can look at this as within an OT program. An example might be an OT class organizing a SOTA event where a group of OT's get together. This is where we start to think about culture in a different light than how we might typically think about culture. We typically think of culture as ethnic and racial driven however looking at that definition through OTPF, we are looking at any group within society of which the client is a member of.
Occupational Therapy as a Culture
Therefore everyone who is engaged in this webinar, occupational therapists, this is a culture that we belong to. When you think about this culture of what occupational therapy does and being an occupational therapist, it clearly influences your beliefs, your activity patterns, your behavior standards and the expectations that you have. Within that, if you have ever been to an AOTA conference, we are sharing a common ideology and we are designating insiders from outsiders.
