Back to and beyond Berry's basics: The conceptualization, operationalization and classification of acculturation (original) (raw)
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A two-way process? A qualitative and quantitative investigation of majority members’ acculturation
Acculturation refers to changes that result from intercultural contact. Although it is commonly defined as a two-way process with changes occurring among both minority members and majority members, surprisingly little research has focused on the acculturation of majority members. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, the present study attempted to fill this gap by exploring how and how much majority members change because of exposure to immigrant cultures. In the first part, using an open-response format, majority members reported positive as well as negative cultural change across a broad range of life domains. Most changes were reported in the private as compared to public sphere, and in terms of behaviours rather than values. Second, based on their responses to quantitative acculturation scales, the majority-group participants could meaningfully be clustered into three acculturation strategies commonly used to describe minority-group members’ acculturation, namely a separation, integration and undifferentiated acculturation cluster. No evidence for an assimilation cluster was found. Separated majority members (i.e., who maintain their majority culture but do not adopt immigrant cultures) reported significantly more identity threat and perceived ethnic discrimination, but also higher self-esteem. Interestingly, integrated majority members (i.e., who both maintain their majority culture and adopt immigrant cultures) were three times less likely to live in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods as compared to separated participants. The results of this study offer important insights into majority members’ acculturation experiences and their psychological importance. Implications for culturally plural societies and future research are discussed.
Rethinking the Concept of Acculturation: Implications for Theory and Research
This article presents an expanded model of acculturation among international migrants and their immediate descendants. Acculturation is proposed as a multidimensional process consisting of the confluence among heritage-cultural and receiving-cultural practices, values, and identifications. The implications of this reconceptualization for the acculturation construct, as well as for its relationship to psychosocial and health outcomes, are discussed. In particular, an expanded operationalization of acculturation is needed to address the " immigrant paradox, " whereby international migrants with more exposure to the receiving cultural context report poorer mental and physical health outcomes. We discuss the role of ethnicity, cultural similarity, and discrimination in the acculturation process, offer an operational definition for context of reception, and call for studies on the role that context of reception plays in the acculturation process. The new perspective on acculturation presented in this article is intended to yield a fuller understanding of complex acculturation processes and their relationships to contextual and individual functioning.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2005
The worldwide volume and social relevance of migratory processes justify the need to study the psychological acculturation of the host and immigrant populations through a model adapted to the social context in which they develop. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to carry out a review of some of the existing acculturation models (up with a proposal for a Relative Acculturation Extended Model (RAEM). This theoretical framework gathers some elements from previous models and adds some new ones in order to offer new explanations for the acculturation strategies and attitudes preferred by both the native and immigrant populations. The most relevant contributions of the RAEM can be summarised as, on the one hand, the consideration of different acculturation domains (political, work, economic, family, social, religion and ways of thinking) and on the other, the differentiation between the acculturation strategies adopted in reality and the acculturation attitudes ideally preferred by the groups in contact. This model also takes into account the ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/ijintrel 0147-1767/$ -see front matter r (M. Navas). ethnocultural origin of immigrants and some variables predicting and modulating their acculturation strategies and attitudes. r
Acculturation Attitudes and the Ethnic and Host-Country Identification of Immigrants
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2002
This study assessed a number of potential predictors of host-country and ethnic-group identification of members of immigrant groups to Australia. The study included 281 adult participants from Vietnam, Hong Kong, and New Zealand, who responded to questions relating to their acculturation attitudes, host-culture and ethnic-group identification, and experiences in their new country. Results showed that the predictors of host country (Australian) identification were the immigrants' acculturation attitude of wanting to live according to host standards and values, lower ethnic versus Australian social involvement, lower ethnic prejudice, higher job status, and acceptance by Australians. The major predictors of ethnic-group identification were an acculturation attitude of wanting to live according to ethnic-group standards, higher ethnic versus Australian social involvement, lower self-esteem, fewer Australian friends, lower ability to speak English, higher education, lower self-efficacy, and number of ethnic friends. The implications for the acculturation of immigrants are discussed.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2023
Do minority-group members welcome or reject that majority-group members adopt other cultures? Acculturation is commonly defined as a process of mutual accommodation. Yet, the acculturation of majority-group members has only recently received research attention. To date, we do not know the extent to which minority-group members expect majority-group members to adopt the culture of minority groups and/or to maintain their mainstream culture. Knowledge is also lacking about how these expectations relate to minority-group members' own acculturation orientations and symbolic and realistic threat perceptions. We further do not know whether such associations are similar among minority-and majority-group members. To address these gaps, we surveyed 246 Muslim minority-group members and 247 White Christian majority-group members in the United Kingdom. Muslim minority-group members' acculturation expectations towards majority-group members were normally distributed around the midpoint of the scale, suggesting that they did not reject majority-group acculturation on average. Acculturation expectations were correlated with symbolic and realistic threat perceptions among majority-group members but not among minority-group members. Cluster analyses showed that integrated Muslim minority-group members found it relatively important for majority-group members to adopt minority-group culture and to maintain their own culture. In sum, the results support the idea that minoritygroup members, at least in some contexts and settings, view acculturation as a mutual cultural change rather than as cultural appropriation. Whereas acculturation is commonly defined as a mutual accommodation process, most research has focused on cultural changes among immigrants and minority groups 1 rather than majority groups (Kunst et al., 2021). However, over the recent years, we have increasingly learned about the processes, antecedents, and outcomes of the acculturation of majority-group members. Majority-group acculturation can be defined as "the cultural and psychological changes that current or former majority-group members experience
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2011
The concept of acculturation attitudes refers to the various ways that acculturating individuals prefer to live with the two cultures that they are in contact with. In the original acculturation attitudes framework, Berry proposed a two-dimensional structure. The two dimensions were: to what extent do acculturating individuals prefer to maintain their heritage culture and identity; and to what extent do people wish to have contact with others outside their own group, and participate in the larger society. When these two dimensions are crossed, four ways of acculturating can be distinguished: assimilation, integration, separation, marginalisation. The first goal of this paper is to use other ways of operationalising these two dimensions to discover the resultant variations in the classification of individuals into the four ways of acculturating. The second goal is to see whether these variations in classifying ways of acculturation lead to different relationships with immigrants' psychological wellbeing. We examine both questions using data from immigrant youth in Montreal and Paris, and conclude that different operationalisations of these two dimensions do yield some important variations in classification. There are also variations across these ways of assessing acculturation attitudes in their relationships with the psychological wellbeing of immigrant youth. Moreover, these variations are amplified when taking into account the society into which immigrant youth have settled. The general conclusions are that it does matter how and where acculturation attitudes are assessed, and that these variations impact the degree of psychological adaptation of immigrant youth.
Five meanings of integration in acculturation research
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2008
Integration is the crucial concept in psychology of acculturation. Yet, it has been loosely defined in the literature and there is no theory of intercultural psychological integration. Upon careful examination of research findings, at least five different meanings of integration emerge. Most known among them is Berry's approach, which considers and measures integration in terms of attitudinal preferences for biculturalism. Four other belong to cultural psychology and refer to: culture perception and evaluation; functional/ partial specialization; identity and frame switching; and ethno-relativist constructive marginality. Empirical evidence shows that these are separate, and sometimes negatively correlated constructs. This paper is the first step attempt towards a theoretical model of integration in which all the five meanings are positioned as in depth directed layers of the bicultural psyche. #