Etic and Emic Perspectives

Etic and Emic Perspectives
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Etic and Emic Perspectives
In his article, Goode (1992) differentiates between etic and emic perspectives. According to the author, etic perspectives refer to the “objective, analytic, and clinical approaches to understanding culture and human behavior” (198). On the other hand, emic perspectives refer to the approaches that seek to understand the culture and human behavior from a subjective or insider point of view. While the etic perspective examines a situation externally, the emic perspective goes deeper to understand the social environment surrounding a situation. Etic perspective on a client’s competence relies on the clinician’s training, the social organization of clinical work, and the instruments and procedures in the clinical setting. On the other hand, the emic perspective of a client depends on the view of the client’s social group. From the etic perspective, deviation from accepted normal behavior yields no value while from the emic perspective, there is an emphasis on the value and creativity of deviant behaviors. Lastly, the etic perspective leads to fault finding while the emic perspective allows other people to gain a sense of rationality, efficiency, and purpose of native behaviors.
Many different qualities make up both the etic and emic frameworks. From the etic perspective, a patient may be described as difficult to handle, mild hypertension, controlled type II diabetes, normal sinus rhythm, requires moderate assistance to move, and poor receptive and expressive language. As pointed out by Goode (1992), the attitudes of clinicians and researchers from the etic perspective are objective and dependent on the clinical environment and procedures. As seen from the examples, they are tech...