AAMUSTED Knowledge Manager

Welcome to the AAMUSTED Knowledge Manager (Institutional Repository), an open access digital archive of scholarly intellectual and research outputs of AAMUSTED. The Knowledge Manager contains and preserves: Theses and Dissertations; Research Articles and Conference Papers; Rare and Special Materials and many other Digital Assets of the University.

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 12

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Access status: Open Access ,
Highlighting Personality and Social Psychological Theories From Majority World Contexts: Introduction to the Special Issue
(Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2025) Baffour Adjei, Stephen; Pegah, Nejat; Amber, Gayle Thalmayer; Adler, M. Jonathan M.
Since the inception of scientific psychology in the 19th century, the lead in conceptualizing scientific phenomena has been taken by scholars in Western contexts (North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand), who comprise only 11% of the world’s population. Today, the science and practice of psychology continue to be dominated by Western theoretical perspectives. Recognizing the necessity for inclusive excellence in the field and the barriers that Majority World scholars face in joining the global knowledge economy, Personality and Social Psychology Review (PSPR) has taken several steps toward global inclusion. To further realize this goal, this Special Issue brings together nine contributions that reflect personality and social psychological theory rooted in diverse Majority World contexts, specifically stemming from African, Latin American, Middle Eastern, East and South Asian, and Indigenous American scholars. The contributions reflect several cross-cutting themes: the deeply historical contexts in which personality and social psychological phenomena play out in different geographies today; the important particularities of widely studied concepts in specific local contexts; and the dynamic interplay between individual people and the specificity of their social contexts. By curating indigenous concepts and theories, we aim to further catalyze dialogue across cultural distances in the field and to demonstrate how a decolonized editorial process can help promote inclusive science to improve the dominant perspectives in personality and social psychology
Access status: Open Access ,
The Social Intentionality of Battered Women’s Agency in Ghana
(Psychology and Developing Societies, 2018) Baffour Adjei, Stephen
There is a growing body of research which suggests that victims of intimate partner violence (IPV; mostly women) continue to remain in abusive relationships. Many of the Western psychological theorisations focus on battered women’s personal dispositions and/or the self-creating (individualistic) view of agency to explain why victims remain in violent relationships. These studies seem to suggest that staying in a violent relationship is a personal decision that victims make in free will, and that victims who continue to stay fail to act on their own behalf. Drawing upon the Ghanaian communal conceptualisation of personhood and the social norms of marriage and divorce, this study questions the individu alistic theorisations of battered women’s decisions to stay in or leave abusive relationships. The article argues that battered women’s agency in negotiating the stay/leave decisions in abusive relationships does not only originate in an independent autonomous self, nor constituted by a person’s internal motives, but also, and even primarily, it is culturally grounded and dependent on social relations for its realisation. The article concludes that the agency of abused women in Ghana has a social inten tionality, in the sense that battered women’s intentional behaviour in marital relationships is both constituted by self and constrained by their relational embeddedness.
Access status: Open Access ,
Assessing Women Empowerment in Africa: A Critical Review of the Challenges of the Gender Empowerment Measure of the UNDP
(Psychology and Developing Societies, 2015) Baffour Adjei, Stephen
This review discusses the religious and cultural challenges to the empow erment of women in some patriarchal societies in Africa. The article takes a critical reflection on some of the contextual deficiencies of the gender empowerment measure (GEM) developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as a universal benchmark for assessing gender inequality. It has been highlighted that agency is a necessary com ponent in the conceptualisation and realisation of women empowerment particularly in Africa. The article further demonstrates that the GEM has capitalist, elitist and Eurocentric biases that account for a relatively small percentage of women in the formal sector of the African economy. The nuances of multiple and overlapping identities of women in many African countries that are not adequately encapsulated in the scope of the GEM are discussed. It is thus concluded that women empowerment measures and indicators should be sensitive to the context and values of those it seeks to assess rather than adopting abstract mappings that tend to reduce and universalise all women in all societies.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Social Intentionality of Battered Women’s Agency in Ghana
(Psychology and Developing Societies, 2018) Baffour Adjei, Stephen
There is a growing body of research which suggests that victims of intimate partner violence (IPV; mostly women) continue to remain in abusive relationships. Many of the Western psychological theorisations focus on battered women’s personal dispositions and/or the self-creating (individualistic) view of agency to explain why victims remain in violent relationships. These studies seem to suggest that staying in a violent relationship is a personal decision that victims make in free will, and that victims who continue to stay fail to act on their own behalf. Drawing upon the Ghanaian communal conceptualisation of personhood and the social norms of marriage and divorce, this study questions the individu alistic theorisations of battered women’s decisions to stay in or leave abusive relationships. The article argues that battered women’s agency in negotiating the stay/leave decisions in abusive relationships does not only originate in an independent autonomous self, nor constituted by a person’s internal motives, but also, and even primarily, it is culturally grounded and dependent on social relations for its realisation. The article concludes that the agency of abused women in Ghana has a social inten tionality, in the sense that battered women’s intentional behaviour in marital relationships is both constituted by self and constrained by their relational embeddedness.
Access status: Open Access ,
Conceptualising personhood, agency, and morality for African psychology
(2019) Baffour Adjei, Stephen
One of the functions of psychological science is to develop concepts for thinking about people and their well-being. Since its establishment as a scientific discipline in the late 19th century, psychology has developed concepts that are essentially rooted in the specific spatio-temporal context of Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. There is a growing ontological and epistemological awareness that psychological science and practices from WEIRD cultural spaces cannot be exclusively representative of the African experience. I draw from interpersonal violence research to discuss the concepts of personhood, agency, and morality from an African perspective and highlight their theoretical and practical utility for psychological science. Based on African communalism, I argue that an understanding of personhood, agency, and morality as culturally contextualised and socially intentioned phenomena is foundational to the advancement of heterogeneous practices of knowledge production in diverse contexts.

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