Targeting Messages

Attitudes, Values and Beliefs

Culture permeates many of our personal attitudes, values and behaviors, including:

• Whether primary importance is placed on the individual or on the community
• What roles for women, men, and children are generally accepted
• Whether the preferred family structure is nuclear or extended, one generation or multigenerational
• How important folk wisdom, life experience, "mother wit" and common sense are in comparison to formal education and advanced degrees
• How wealth is measured - in material goods, like money and property, or in personal relationships, like children, extended family support systems and friendships
• Whether we revere our elders as the repositories of wisdom
• How time is used and valued - for example, the importance of being on time
• Whether people are tradition-bound or open to experimentation
• How religious life and/or spirituality and secular life are linked
• What foods we favor and which are forbidden
• How we dress and adorn ourselves
• What body language means, particularly whether touching or close proximity is permitted in specific situations