We have emotional reactions to the cultural change. The stress that results from the cultural change is called acculturation stress. This stress can be positive the person enjoys being in a new environment and looks forward to learning and adapting and negative the person is overwhelmed by all the changes. Many factors play into acculturative stress and the possible intensity of stress experienced by the individual: how similar and dissimilar the two cultures are, whether the contact is voluntary or not for example, choosing to emigrate as opposed a forced relocation , whether the contact is permanent immigrant versus international student.
How much Mandarin? What foods does she eat? What books does she read? What TV shows? Who does she hang out with? What are her attitudes and values? These questions are used to notice how much has Lily taken on the American culture and how much she holds on to Chinese culture. This way of thinking assumes that immigrants such as Lily assimilate into the mainstream culture of the US.
It is a one dimensional model. Lily may be Chinese in some ways and more American in others; she may be more Chinese with her family, but more American with her peers.
She may consider herself to be both Chinese and American, or neither. John Berry has a model for acculturation that I find very useful to describe how people adapt to a new culture.. The two dimensions used to gauge acculturation leads to the following table sometimes called a 2 x 2 matrix that describe four ways people may chose to adjust to a new culture. The 4 ways to adjust to a new culture correspond to 4 different acculturation strategies that people use in response to a new culture.
Conceptualization: JWB. Data curation: LH. Formal analysis: LH. Investigation: LH YZ. Methodology: LH. Project administration: LH YZ. Resources: YZ LH. Supervision: YZ. Writing — original draft: LH. Received Apr 13; Accepted Sep This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract International research has mostly confirmed the positive association between acculturation strategies and resilience in ethnic groups, but the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying the relationships are still under-investigated.
Introduction An earthquake of magnitude 8 struck Sichuan province in China on May 12, Acculturation Acculturation is broadly defined as a process of cultural and psychological change that occurs when two cultural groups interact [ 11 ].
Resilience Particularly during the last two decades, numerous researchers, clinicians, psychologists, and sociologists have shifted their focus from risk to resilience [ 29 — 32 ]. Acculturation, Personality, Spiritual Belief, and Social Support Effect on Resilience A growing number of studies have assessed the association between acculturation and psychological outcomes following a traumatic event [ 43 , 44 ]. The Present Study The aim of the current study was to examine a structural model of resiliency in relation to four acculturation strategies that were derived from crossing two cultural identities , personality, spiritual beliefs and social support among people of Qiang ethnicity in China.
Method Participants Participants in the current study consisted of Qiang ethnic volunteers who came from Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan province. Results and Analysis The Statistical analysis of Common Method Biases Since data from self-reports may produce method biases, we adopted an anonymous survey and reversed some items in data processing [ 65 ].
Intercorrelations between all variables Table 1 presents zero-order correlations and descriptive statistics among the primary variables. Qiang cultural identity — 3. National cultural identity 0. Personality 0. Spiritual belief 0. Social support 0. Resilience 0. Open in a separate window. A structural equation model of resilience among Qiang sample We proposed a conceptual model Fig 1 based on a previous research on resilience.
Fig 1. Fig 2. The modified model of resilience. Table 2 The mediation effect structural equation model of fit indices. Table 3 The moderation effect structural equation model of fit indices.
Fig 3. The interaction graph of resilience. One-way analysis on cultural identities and resilience for different acculturation strategies in Qiang sample According to the acculturation strategies framework, there are four expected acculturation strategies. The Mediating Effect of Personality and Spiritual Belief Intercultural psychology has shown that cultural groups and their individual members both immigrants and ethnic groups usually undergo cultural and psychological changes following intercultural contact [ 10 , 11 ].
The Moderating Effect of Social Support Social support refers to the resources provided by others that assist individual in daily activities [ 81 ]. Conclusion Resilience is the ability to spring back from adversity and to successfully adapt after traumatic events. SAV Click here for additional data file. Data Availability All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.
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Psychopathology and resilience following traumatic injury: A latent growth mixture model analysis. He spoke of having learned Finnish working culture during one practical work training, which was the only latent benefit explicitly mentioned in his interview.
Overall, he rarely had any possibilities to practise Finnish with natives because of having only a little contact with them, since most of his co-workers in his previous practical work training were non-Finns, such as the other students on Finnish language courses.
Neither did he express much interest in having contact with natives over time. In all, his socio-cultural adaptation proceeded very slowly, and combined with difficulties in his labour market integration, he thought that moving out of Finland could be an option for him in the future, which was the case with the other participant on this path too.
They both felt there was a gap between them and Finnish society, as well as its representatives, and were not at all satisfied with their life in Finland. Achieving adequate employment and related latent benefits could possibly help them to adapt to Finland, but if they keep struggling to find a job, work opportunities in other countries probably start to increasingly attract them. Officially, he had been unemployed during his whole stay in Finland, but by the time of the second follow-up interview, he had gone through six practical work trainings, none of which related to his education in Iraq.
The following quote about the advantages of practical work training is from T1, after just finishing his third training:. It's too useful and I think it's a really great chance to be in touch with people, since maybe offering [getting] jobs is not too easy as you are offering [getting] internship. From the start, the participant had been aware of the fact that finding employment in his own field could be difficult and it would take a long time.
He also knew that if he wanted to work in his previous profession, starting persistently from a lower level was unavoidable and climbing the career ladder would happen later.
You need to try your best [in a new country]. You need to apply [for practical work trainings]. Because at the end, as I said, it [practical work training] is a place where you can practise your language, you can meet more people and you are kind of empowering your network with people.
As he saw it, any kind of work could provide him with skills needed in the Finnish labour market. In practical work trainings, regarded as a form of inadequate employment in this study, he gained latent benefits of employment by learning the Finnish language and work culture, and expanding his social networks towards natives. In spite of the difficulties in developing his career and obtaining adequate employment in Finland, he had managed to stay active — presumably with the help of different practical work trainings — and to keep a positive attitude for the whole period studied.
So far, inadequate employment had not deteriorated his well-being but instead had provided him with the necessary cultural skills and social capital. He had clear plans and he was confident that his future in Finland would be bright, but he knew that he would have to learn Finnish better in order to pursue his professional dreams. During the course of the study, it became evident that although employment was regarded as one of the most important goals in the lives of the well-educated participants, finding adequate employment was extremely difficult for them.
Of the seven participants, only one was adequately employed at T1, and another participant at T2, i. However, by T2 all participants had gained some experience regarding working life and culture in Finland, either through normal salary work or practical work training coordinated by TE offices or educational programmes for newly arrived asylum-seekers.
At T1, both the inadequately employed and unemployed participants were reluctant to give up the idea of finding satisfactory employment. However, by the end of the study, expectations regarding finding adequate employment and thereby coping financially in Finland had become more pessimistic.
At this point in time, the participants were probably still entitled to their integration plan, and they all had attended integration training or related language and vocational courses. For most participants in this study, however, the official employment services had not been that helpful in developing their job-search-related skills, at least not during the first approximately 2.
This is interesting since the local TE offices provide immigrants with skills that ought to facilitate employment, such as career counselling and efficient job search strategies, with the help of which one should be able to also network in the direction of Finnish employers. In this study, those who were resilient and willing to broaden their perspective underwent the acculturation process more smoothly than those who had a more passive approach towards managing the cultural differences and the new way of life — possibly resulting from their earlier failures to cope with the sudden challenges that have been brought by living in a foreign culture.
However, even though being active is usually crucial when entering the labour market of a new country, 77 in this study activity, determination and a positive attitude were not always enough to secure adequate employment. It has also been noted in other studies that immigrants with a refugee background face more challenges and unequal treatment as compared with natives and other immigrant groups. In this study, a pro-active approach in job-seeking and career-building was clearly an asset for those two participants who found employment with the help of bonding social capital; particularly between T1 and T2, these participants took the opportunity to utilise the labour market-related knowledge and networks their co-ethnics had accumulated during the many years living in Finland.
In such a situation, a lack of language proficiency and being unaccustomed to communicating skills to potential employers may not be a hindrance as it often is when seeking employment in the companies run by Finns. According to the results of this study, employment is connected to all four adaptation aspects studied. To summarise the findings on the relationship between employment and psychological adaptation, in line with Jahoda 81 and the extensive empirical literature on the positive effects of employment on subjective well-being, also the participants in this study perceived employment as having a notable boosting effect on their psychological well-being, physical health, and life satisfaction i.
Overall, employment was generally regarded as the single most crucial factor for successful acculturation in a new country. In accordance with the theoretical assumptions of Jahoda, 82 the latent benefits of employment played a remarkable role in this process: through employment, the employed participants could create social networks, feel that they are working towards shared goals and construct their professional identity and perceived status in the eyes of other people, and thereby further enhance their well-being and life-satisfaction.
Inactivity was more salient at the beginning of the study, whereas alternative ways of coping with unemployment were found towards the end of the follow-up period. Overall, the participants perceived unemployment as a major cause of stress and poor well-being, which resulted from being deprived of both latent and manifest benefits of employment.
However, the participants showed different ways of managing the negative effects of unemployment: some through their own non-paid activities, such as getting involved in volunteering, and others through studying or inadequate employment. The BEIIC model, which along with psychological adaptation also includes three other adaptation aspects through which the progress of the acculturation process can be examined, proved to be a useful tool for analysing the data and organising the findings of this study.
The findings of both T1 and T2 supported our rationale of integrating the three latent benefits related to acquiring host-country cultural capital as an additional block to the BEIIC model: According to most participants, employment functions as a necessary medium for more in-depth learning about the culture of the new country, including the values, rules and, importantly, the behaviour and habits of its representatives.
The findings of this study are in line with the previous studies 83 that emphasise the importance of the workplace for learning a new language, cultural values, norms and conventions needed both at the workplace and in everyday life.
While the majority of the participants in this study saw the Finnish language as the single biggest obstacle to their employment, the workplace was still generally considered as the best place to learn the language.
Those participants who preferred learning the language by working instead of the integration training saw learning profession-related vocabulary through working as more beneficial for their future employment than the content of language courses.
The ability to cope with the challenges posed by the new culture was often easier and less stressful for those who had learned cultural and language skills through employment, which positively affected their well-being. Moreover, they had gained more understanding about equality in Finnish society as well as the freedom to express oneself.
According to them, in Finland, it is also easier to question Iraqi cultural norms and think independently than it is in Iraq.
For many, this had triggered a personal transformation process, including major changes in their values as well as new ways of thinking, thus affecting not only their socio-psychological adaptation but also their economic adaptation: Learning work culture and language was generally seen as crucial for future employment. When it comes to other latent benefits of employment, in many cases, the aforementioned cultural learning had happened through engaging in social encounters with the natives in a work context.
A workplace was perceived as one of the most natural and relaxed settings for creating social networks with natives, especially in case one did not have many other opportunities to mingle with them. This result is in line with the contact hypothesis: 84 the workplace offers immigrants a chance to interact with natives in circumstances where intergroup contact is usually supported by the organisation, and it happens between people of a more equal status who at least to some extent share similar interests and work towards the same goals, which may crucially reduce prejudices among the two groups.
In line with previous studies considering professional identity among professionally qualified refugees, 87 the participants of this study also often regarded their Iraqi education and previous occupation as an important part of their professional identity — perhaps at least partly due to already having to give up so many fundamental parts of their identity when leaving Iraq. In general, however, many were disappointed with the depreciation of education and work experience obtained in Iraq.
Even though at T0 all participants emphasised their strong work motivation, at T1, three out of four unemployed participants refused to consider the possibility of starting work with some menial job unrelated to their education. By T2, however, they all had undergone a clear change of attitude towards accepting work not corresponding to their education. Remarkably, in their study, those participants who had become disillusioned ran a clear risk of becoming more passive about their acculturation, seeing themselves as ill-fated victims of their circumstances.
One of them had totally lost her motivation to work due to difficulties in her economic adaptation between T1 and T2, and related health problems, and two other participants had started to think that employment could be easier to obtain in other countries. However, the other three unemployed or inadequately employed participants were still active in their own acculturation process, holding on to the idea that as long as they kept the right attitude, they would eventually succeed in becoming adequately employed.
In this study, perceiving that one works for a collective purpose helped the immigrants perceive themselves as being a part of something meaningful and having value in the community, which boosted both their well-being i.
Paying taxes is closely connected to manifest benefits, since receiving income is a prerequisite for being a taxpayer. Particularly for recent immigrants, almost any kind of employment that includes functioning as part of a work community — even voluntary work, as also suggested by Jahoda 93 — may bring at least some advantages, such as latent benefits related to the immigration context and potentially of great value for future employment.
On the negative side of inadequate employment is also the threat of getting stuck in different kinds of welfare traps. Hence, different forms of inadequate employment cannot become a long-term solution, since immigrants too need an opportunity to progress in their careers and earn sufficient income as well as utilise their knowledge and skills.
If well-educated immigrant job seekers decide to leave Finland due to employment difficulties lasting several years or permanently exit the labour force due to losing first their hope of employment and later also their ability to work, their skills and the resources put into their integration process are wasted.
At T1, most participants were experiencing psychological stress known as cognitive dissonance, caused by two contradictory thought patterns regarding their economic adaptation: According to the participants, the most difficult task in Finland was getting adequately employed, whereas a much easier thing to learn was how to collect social benefits if not working at all.
Unemployment, combined with the need for social benefits, raised feelings of unworthiness and frustration, even humiliation among them — as also described in the study of Willott and Stevenson. Strikingly, after spending approximately 2. Eligibility for social benefits had helped them to reach out to society at large so as to learn the language and new skills in practical work training and other working life-related activities without having to worry too much about their income.
This kind of rather rapid attitudinal change may, however, hold either good or bad consequences. On the one hand, with the help of social benefits, participants could either take their time to find a job matching their education and work experience or study the missing skills needed for a certain job they found appealing, and this in turn could help them maintain a healthy identity and enhance their well-being.
On the other hand, if an immigrant adapts too well to receiving social benefits — namely accepts the fact that they can earn a living without working on a long-term basis — or finds the threat of welfare traps and related bureaucracy too exhausting to fight with as almost all kinds of changes in income affect the social benefits received, the social benefit system does not necessarily motivate an unemployed person to search for a job.
This was reflected in the experiences of two participants. In this study, however, the bureaucracy trap seemed even more harmful for well-being than being stuck in an unemployment trap; in Finland, an unemployed person usually knows the amount of unemployment benefit, whereas combining a small salary from, say, part-time employment and social benefits can cause great uncertainty over monthly income. Notably, along with causing a financial burden for society, every situation that discourages an unemployed person from accepting employment may severely impact their well-being and slow down the entire acculturation process by depriving them of the latent benefits of employment.
To conclude, while labour market entry at T1 involved financial concerns among the unemployed and inadequately employed, by T2 the latent benefits of employment or the lack thereof had become more important and the urge to manifest benefits of employment had diminished due to greater acceptance of having to make ends meet with the help of social benefits. The original sample of 22 participants diminished as only seven were granted international protection in Finland. During the time of the baseline data collection in December while the participants were still waiting for their asylum decisions, the Finnish government dramatically tightened its asylum policy, which led to a steep decline in the number of positive asylum decisions.
However, as all the seven participants who were granted international protection in Finland agreed to be interviewed for three times, a follow-up study could be constructed. Even with such a small sample, the longitudinal setting was certainly an asset. The understanding of the long-term acculturation process among this particular group would have been difficult had the interviews been conducted only once instead of three times. No inconsistencies were found in the answers given at the different periods of time, which enhances the reliability of the findings.
However, in addition to the factors dealt with in this article — of which many were somehow related to the work context e. Moreover, 2. Therefore, it would be extremely interesting to interview the participants again after a few more years. Overall, studies focusing on the long-term adaptation outcomes related to economic adaptation, while also taking into consideration the interplay between different aspects of adaptation, are strongly called for.
A proposed BEIIC model may prove to be a useful tool for further studies conducted in different immigration and labour market settings and among various migrant groups. Research for this article has been funded by the Strategic Research Council, Academy of Finland Nyman, Living in Limbo. See T. Etzold, Refugee Policy in Northern Europe. See, for instance, S. Cohen, M. See, for instance, J. Liebkind, L. Koivunen, H. Matsumoto ed. Jahoda, Employment and Unemployment.
See for a review, S. Schwartz, J. Unger, B. Crawley et al. See, for instance, R. Hainmueller, D. See, for instance, P. See, for instance, N. Olwig, B. Rytter eds. See, for instance, ibid. Liebkind, I. Masten, K. Hernandez eds. See, for instance, B. Bratsberg, O. Bevelander, Integrating Refugees into Labor Markets. See G.
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