Acculturation

When writing about acculturation, the following concepts should be explained:

Acculturation: The psychological and behavioural adjustments that occur within individuals who come into contact with others from different cultural backgrounds.

Acculturative stress: The anxiety that one may feel when attempting to assimilate to a new culture.

Assimilation: the process in which a minority group or culture adopts the values, behaviors, and beliefs of the majority group.

Integration: The process in which an individual assumes the beliefs, values, and behaviours of another culture without losing the characteristics of his or her own culture.

Marginalization: A failure to acculturate when it is not really possible to maintain one’s original culture, but because of exclusion or discrimination, it is not possible to assimilate into the new culture.

Separation: When migrants maintain their own culture and minimize contact with the new culture.

Lueck and Wilson

Aim: to investigate the variables that may predict acculturative stress in a nationally representative sample of Asian immigrant and Asian Americans

Procedure: \n the researchers carried out semi-structured interviews conducted either face-to-face or over the Internet by interviewers of a similar cultural/linguistic background of participants \n a random sample of participants was contacted to validate the data taken from the interviews \n the interviews measured the participants' level of acculturative stress, the impact of language proficiency, language preference, discrimination, social networks, family cohesion, and socioeconomic status on this stress

Findings: \n of the 2095 participants, 1433 were found to have acculturative stress (70%)

Strengths:

• provides detailed (rich qualitative) information
• provides insight for further research
• permitting investigation of otherwise impractical (or unethical) situations
• high ecological validity

Limitations:

• inability to generalize results to the wider population
• researcher bias
• difficult to replicate (but other studies, like that of Clive Wearing, display the same results confirm the findings)
• time-consuming ?

Miranda and Matheny

Aim: \n to investigate which factors in the lives of Latino immigrants to the United States would decrease the level of acculturative stress

Procedure: participants completed a questionnaire and tests to assess family cohesion, level of acculturation, acculturative stress, and coping strategies for stress

Findings: researchers found that immigrants with effective coping strategies, good proficiency in English, and a strong family structure were less likely to experience acculturative stress \n in addition, immigrants who spent a longer time in the US were less likely to demonstrate this stress and showed a higher level of acculturation

Strengths:

• relatively cheap, quick, and efficient way of gathering information from a large sample of people
• high ecological validity

Limitations:

• social desirability --> false responses
• low reliability (internal validity)
• no cause and effect relationship

When discussing acculturation, you may consider the following points:

• Many of the constructs that are studied in acculturation research could be considered subjective and difficult to measure on a standardized scale - e.g. acculturative stress, family cohesion, life satisfaction.
• There is often a language problem in giving tests to immigrants.  It is not only a question of whether they understand the vocabulary of the test but how they interpret the questions.
• When measuring “acculturation,” psychologists make assumptions about what healthy acculturation looks like.
• There are many variables that may influence the experience of migrants to a new culture.  These include the immigrants' age at the time of migration, length of residency, education, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic class, and trauma experienced prior to arrival in the new culture.  This makes it difficult to find representative samples that can be used to generate theory about the acculturation experience.
• There are several ethical considerations in research on acculturation. It is important that in any research the participants are aware of their rights as participants.  This includes the right to informed consent, anonymity, and to withdraw from the study.
• In the study of immigrants, illegal immigrants are often absent from the research for fear of discovery and deportation.