Investigating interdependent self in post-communist countries: A comparison of two Slovak and Danish generations

ABSTRACT

Some evidence suggests prevalence of collectivist values and interdependent self in post-communist Europe. However, research on social representations identifies a possible divide between Eastern Europeans’ appreciation of their immediate social environment on the one hand and their suspicion toward impersonal collectives on the other. The current study aimed to capture this divide by investigating two types of interdependent self, namely relational and collective. Specifically, we compared self-descriptions in two Slovak samples—“old” with a communist experience (n = 80) and “young” without it (n = 80)—and used a country that has never been communist (Denmark; n = 80 x 2) to control for age effects. Results showed predominance of independent self in all groups, higher relational self in both old groups, and highest collective self among the young Slovaks. This indicates no association between communist experience and interdependent self, but a possible post-communist effect is suggested. Theoretically, the study substantiated the importance of disentangling interdependence.

KEYWORDS:

• Collectivism
• interdependence
• post-communism
• self
• TST

Notes

1. For the sake of brevity, we refer to the two samples within each country as generations, even though the younger samples were represented by homogeneous and older samples by heterogeneous age groups (see Participants).

2. A specific case in this respect was I am married, which could be understood as both specific relational and group self-description; we decided to count it in the first category.

3. The raw data is available for re-analysis from the first author upon request.

4. To explore for possible confounding effects, we re-ran the analysis including gender and place of residence as predictor variables. Gender was considered on the basis of previous research that had documented gender differences in self-construals (Cross & Madson, 1997; Gabriel & Gardner, 1999; Watkins et al., 1998, 2003). Place of residence was included due to the different distribution of the old Slovaks as compared to the old Danes in this variable. Since controlling for the two variables did not change the general pattern of results with respect to nationality and generation, we report the analysis without them. Moreover, due to the old generations being represented by heterogeneous age groups, we also checked the results for age effects as covariate in the logistic regression model. We found that age had no significant effect on the prediction of self-descriptions.