Rethinking the Concept of Acculturation

By Seth J. Schwartz, Jennifer B. Unger, Byron L. Zamboanga, J. Szapocznik. American Psychologist, 2010

2,182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bc464b815185db951870ff22afe78eac04e7cb1

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Citations in the corpus

The American Identity Measure: Development and Validation across Ethnic Group and Immigrant Generation (2012, background): “In addition to identification with the United States, American cultural orientations consist of those practices and values that mark one as American, such as eating American food and, to some extent, holding individualist values (Schwartz, Unger, Zamboanga, & Szapocznik, 2010 ).”
Biculturalism and Adjustment (2013, background): “…of Adjustment Average Effect Size (r) Psychological Adjustment Sociocultural Adjustment HealthRelated Adjustment Sanchez & Fernandez (1993) 1 2 164 -.06 Schwartz et al. (2007) 2 8 261 .13 Schwartz et al. (2010) 1 21 773 .12 Smokowski & Bacallao (2007) 1 4 323 .02 Suarez et…”
Parenting Infants (2013, background): “First, because migration is a phase of change, maternal parenting beliefs and behavior might be in a transition state which may not be synchronous on a time scale, as proposed by the multidimensional model of acculturation (Schwartz et al., 2010).”