What is this article about?

In this article, the author discusses different answers to the question of: “how can people of different cultural backgrounds encounter each other, seek avenues of mutual understanding, negotiate and compromise on initial positions, and achieve harmonious engagement?”. Specifically, the author has come up with insights based on the US American/Australian war in Vietnam.

What about group relations?

There are two distinct, but inter-related domains of psychological research that make up the field of group relations. These domains are acculturation and ethnic relations.

Acculturation

Acculturation refers to the dual process of cultural and psychological change which results from contact between two or more cultural groups and their members. On a group level, this involves changes in social structures and institutions and in cultural practices. On an individual level, this involves changes in a person’s behavior. These changes result from a long-term process: sometimes years, generations, and sometimes even centuries. Cultural and psychological changes that involve different forms of mutual accommodations which lead to longer-term psychological and sociocultural adaptations between both groups is called acculturation. Change and contact can result from different factors, such as colonization, military invasion, migration, and sojourning (tourism, international study, overseas posting).

Acculturation involves learning each other’s languages, sharing each other’s food preferences, and adopting forms of dressing and social interactions that are appropriate for each group. Sometimes this happens easily, but it can also create culture conflict and acculturative stress. An important characteristic of acculturation is it’s variability: there are large group and individual differences in the ways in which people try to achieve acculturation (acculturation strategies), and in the degree to which they achieve successful acculturation. There are also variations within families: family members acculturate at different rates and with different goals. This can lead to conflict between family members and to more difficult adaptation.

What is the concept of acculturation?

There are many competing views about the meaning of acculturation. The author suggests two different formulations which are widely used. In the first formulation, acculturation is seen as one aspect of the broader concept of cultural change. This means that acculturation takes place in the settled or dominant group as well as in the non-dominant group. Acculturation is different from assimilation. In the second formulation, a few extra features are added, such as change that is indirect (not cultural but ecological) and delayed (internal adjustments). Acculturation is also said to be ‘reactive’: by rejecting the cultural influence from the dominant group and changing back towards a more ‘traditional’ way of life.

Graves (1967) introduced the concept of ‘psychological acculturation’. This is defined as changes in an individual who is a participant in a culture contact situation, and is influenced both directly by the external culture and by the changing culture of which the individual is a member.

What about acculturation contexts?

It is important that research on acculturation is conducted in different cultural contexts. Both cultures that are in contact need to be understood. There are five aspects of cultural contexts: the two original cultures (A and B), the two changing ethnocultural groups (A’ and B’), and the nature of their contact and interactions. These are visible in Figure 2.

The authors use the immigration process as an example. The society of origin is A and the society of settlement is B, and the changing cultural features following contact are termed A’ and B’. To fully understand acculturation, one needs to start with a comprehensive examination of the societal contexts. This means that cultural characteristics of the society of origin need to be described. This has the goal of understanding where the person is coming from and to establish cultural features for comparison with the society of settlement. Researchers also need to study the political, economic, and demographic conditions which individuals face in their society of origin. This has the goal of understanding the degree of voluntariness in the motivation to migrate of individuals. Migrants can be described on a continuum between reactive and proactive. Reactive migrants are motivated by negative factors (war), and proactive migrants are motivated by positive factors (getting a better life somewhere else). These factors are also described as push/pull in earlier literature.

Then, with regard to the society of settlement, other factors need to be described. For example, one needs to study the general orientations or attitudes of a society and its citizens toward immigration and pluralism. It is important to understand the historical and attitudinal situation faced by immigrants in the society of settlement. For example, some societies are accepting of cultural pluralism that results from immigration. Other societies try to eliminate diversity, and some societies even try to achieve segregation or marginalization of their diverse populations. Murphy (1965) proposed that societies that are supportive of cultural pluralism provide a more positive settlement context for two reasons. First, they are less likely to enforce cultural change or exclusion on immigrants. Second, they are also more likely to provide social support to immigrants.

What are acculturation strategies?

As noted, there are large differences in how people seek to achieve acculturations. These are called acculturation strategies. There are two components of acculturation strategies: attitudes (an individual’s preference about how to acculturate) and behavior (a person’s actual activities). There are four acculturation strategies which are derived from two basic issues that all acculturating individuals face:

1. A relative preference for maintaining one’s heritage culture and identity;
2. A relative preference for having contact with and participating in the larger society along with other ethnocultural groups.

Non-dominant groups

When individuals do not wish to maintain their cultural identity and seek daily interaction with other cultures, this means that they try to shed their heritage culture and that they become absorbed into the dominant society. This is called an assimilation strategy. In contrast, when individuals place value on holding on to their original culture and wish to avoid interaction with others, then this is a separation strategy. When there is an interest in both maintaining one’s heritage culture while in daily interactions with other groups, this is called an integration strategy. This means that some degree of cultural integrity is maintained, but that an individual is seeking to become an integral part of the larger society. Finally, there can also be a marginalization strategy. This means that there is little possibility of interest for individuals to have relationships with others and also little interest in maintaining the heritage culture.

For dominant groups, other terms should be used. Integration is only a ‘free choice’ when the dominant society is open and inclusive towards cultural diversity. This means that mutual accommodation is needed to attain integration. Non-dominant groups must adopt basic values of the larger society, and the dominant group must be prepared to adapt national institutions to meet the needs of all groups that live together.

Conceptualization of acculturation strategies

In the article, the chosen conceptual approach of acculturation strategies is based on three underlying dimensions: cultural maintenance, contact and participation, and the power to decide on how acculturation will take place. However, researchers often considered only one dimension and assumed that non-dominant groups and individuals would move away from some ‘traditional’  way of living toward a way of living that resembles the dominant society.

Another issue with regard to the conceptualization is that there is little empirical basis for the four acculturation strategies.

What is acculturative stress?

There are two different ways to conceptualize outcomes of acculturation. In the first conceptualization, it is about behavioral shifts. Behavioral shifts are based on observations on changes in an individual’s behavior which take place easily and are usually non-problematic. This process of behavioral shifts involve three sub-processes: cultural shedding, culture learning, and cultural conflict. The first two of these involve the selective, accidental, or deliberate loss of behaviors and a replacement by behaviors which allow an individual to better ‘fit’ with the society of settlement. This process is also often called ‘adjustment’. Sometimes conflicts can occur. When a person is assimilating, these conflicts can be resolved by the acculturating person acting in accordance with the behavioral norms of the dominant group. When someone is pursuing separation, individuals may withdraw to avoid cultural conflict. When individuals seek integration, conflict can be avoided only when the two groups in contact agree that mutual accommodation is the appropriate course to follow. Lastly, when individuals aim for marginalization, they have to deal with cultural conflict daily, and can resolve this by seeking little improvement in either culture.

When there are high levels of cultural conflict, then this is called acculturative stress. This means that individuals understand that they are facing problems because of their intercultural contact which cannot be dealt with easily or quickly.

What about adaptation?

To cope with cultural changes, individuals often adapt and this can lead to long-term adaptations. Adaptation is defined as the relatively stable change that takes place in an individual or group in response to external demands. Furthermore, adaptation may or may not improve the match between individuals and their environments. This thus means that adaptation is not an outcome that is only positive. Adaptation can also be divided into psychological and sociocultural adaptation. Psychological adaptation is defined as one’s psychological and physical well-being. Sociocultural adaptation refers to how well an acculturating individual is able to manage their daily life in the new cultural context. These two are conceptually distinct, but they show a high correlation. However, they are empirically distinct in that psychological problems often arise quick after contact, and decrease over time. Sociocultural adaption shows a linear improvement over time.

Proper psychological adaptation is predicted by personality variables, life change events, and social support. Sociocultural adaptation is predicted by cultural knowledge, degree of contact, and positive intergroup attitudes.

It seems that individuals who pursue and accomplish integration are better adapted. In contrast, individuals who marginalize are the least well adapted.

What can be concluded?

Currently, there are two areas of application which are receiving attention in research and policy development. The first is the domain of family life, which include the relationship among individuals within the family and between family members and the outside world. The other domain is in the area of immigration and settlement policies, which include issues of changes in the institutions of a society, and the promotion of cultural diversity.

Family life

Parents and children hold different views about parent-adolescent relationships during acculturation. This means that parents have higher scores on a measure of family obligations than their adolescent children. In contrast, immigrant youth have higher scores on a scale of adolescent rights (independence in dating) than their parents. The differences between parents and adolescents in their views about family obligations vary according to which acculturation strategy the adolescent is in. For example, adolescents in a national profile (preferring assimilation, having a stronger national identity, and having more national friends) show greater discrepancies between their views and the views of their parents. These discrepancies are associated with poorer psychological and sociocultural adaptation of the adolescents. Another project on family life focuses on similarities and differences in family structure and function. These projects have shown that there are variations in family functioning that is linked to ecological contexts (reliance on agriculture, general affluence) and to variation in socio-political contexts (education, religion). It seems that hierarchical and extended family arrangements have more conservative values in high agrarian and low affluence societies. In contrast, families high in affluence and education are more nuclear, less hierarchical and show more independence. These differences in family life are likely to lead to variations in acculturation strategies, acculturative stress and psychological and sociocultural adaptation.

With regard to public policies, the authors of the article propose that public policies and programs which aim to reduce acculturative stress and improve psychological and sociocultural adaptation should emphasizes the integration approach to acculturation.