The overarching objective of the thesis was to better understand how second generation (G2) East and Southeast Asian emerging adult immigrants make sense of their bicultural identity integration (BII), and in turn experience well-being. Moreover, a domain-specific approach was adopted with the premise that an individual could experience a great deal of well-being in one context (e.g., at home) while encountering significant difficulties in adjustment in another (e.g., in the public sphere). To achieve this, two studies were completed as part of the thesis. In the first study, we focused on family domain adjustment and well-being. In particular, we were interested how parental autonomy support (proxy for individualism) and family allocentrism (proxy for collectivism) were related to participants’ parent-child relationship satisfaction, parent-child relationship conflict, and family-domain subjective well-being. We were also interested in how BII may explain the above relationships through mediation pathways. In the second study, the focus shifted towards community-domain adjustment. Research questions were formulated around the relationships between cultural socialization (independent variable [IV] 1), experiences with microaggressions (IV 2), and sense of belonging to heritage cultural community (dependent variable [DV] 1) and mainstream Canadian community (DV 2). Again, BII was included in the model to determine its ability to explain the above pathways. The results from study 1 revealed that parental autonomy support was positively related to family domain-specific well-being for all participants. Family allocentrism was linked with parent-child relationship satisfaction, but only for participants who had moved away from parents. BII appeared to partially explain the relationship between family allocentrism and parent-child conflict. The results from study 2 revealed that co-ethnic peer cultural socialization towards East and Southeast Asian culture had a positive relationship with participants’ sense of belonging to their heritage community. Meanwhile, parental and Euro-Canadian peer cultural socialization towards Canadian culture had positive relationships with participants’ sense of belonging to the dominant Canadian community. Not surprisingly, microaggressions were negatively linked with participants’ sense of belonging to heritage and Canadian communities. The results from the mediation model again suggested that BII was able to partially explain the link between microaggressions and sense of belonging to heritage and dominant communities. Moreover, BII also appeared to be able to explain some of the relationships between cultural socialization and participants’ sense of belonging. Taken together, the findings from the two studies shed light on how BII may subtly influence well-being differently across the home and community spheres, reinforcing the need to look at BII from a situated approach. Implications for clinicians on how to best support G2 East and Southeast Asian emerging adult immigrants navigating their bicultural identity and experience well-being are discussed.

Guided by the framework of bicultural identity integration (BII), a conceptual model depicting the direct and indirect effects of BII, cognitive flexibility, affect regulation, and coping on psychological wellbeing indicators (i.e., life satisfaction, depression) of adult children of immigrants (ACI) in the U.S. was developed. It was hypothesized that greater BII would contribute to greater cognitive flexibility and affect regulation, which would be associated with more utilization of adaptive coping strategies and greater psychological wellbeing. A total of 240 young ACI from across the U.S. completed the online research questionnaire that measured all variables of interest. Results from structural equation modeling analyses showed adequate model fit with the data. Findings provided support to the indirect effects of BII factors on wellbeing through affect regulation, however, the indirect effect paths are more complicated than what were hypothesized originally. Specifically, higher levels of identity harmony and identity blendedness contributed to more difficulties in emotion regulation, and subsequently, poorer wellbeing. Additionally, both cultural identity harmony and identity blendedness contributed to greater levels of cultural and relational maintenance strategies (i.e., avoidance, forbearance) in the context of intergenerational conflict through affect regulation, but not through cognitive flexibility. Notably, the latent variable of cultural coping strategies retained in the final model was not correlated with wellbeing. Findings are discussed from the BII framework and the sociological context of ACI in the U.S. Limitations, future directions, and implications for counseling, diversity, and advocacy issues are outlined.

Traditional studies of ethnic relations focus on racialization between Whites and Blacks, or ethnic stratification between Whites and people of color. The increasingly integrated world has ensured continued movements of humans and goods and the inevitable contacts between people of different cultural background. This dissertation aims at broadening conventional studies of interethnic relations to examine racial attitudes among people who have internalized more than one culture -- i.e. the biculturals and multiculturals. Social psychological research suggests that bicultural individuals are capable of switching between two cultural meaning frames depending on contextual demands. Bicultural individuals vary in how well they integrate the two cultural identities internalized in them -- i.e., their bicultural identity integration levels (BII levels). Their BII levels lead to either culturally congruent or culturally incongruent behaviors among bicultural individuals. The underlying assumption of linguistic intergroup bias indicates that people tend to describe more abstractly observed positive ingroup behaviors and negative outgroup behaviors and describe more concretely observed negative ingroup behaviors and positive outgroup behaviors. In this study, bicultural Asian American participants are hypothesized to use language of either higher or lower abstraction to describe actions of positive and negative valence performed by either ethnic Asians or European Americans depending on the cultural priming they received and their BII levels. The study results point out the perceived ingroup/outgroup orientation of the bicultural participants towards their coethnics and people of the mainstream culture. Effects of the cultural priming and impact of BII levels are also discussed. / text

Many cross-cultural advertising studies in the last decade focus on matching the advertising messages to consumers’ self-concepts. Despite the cultural differences in self-concept, research on self-concept still has some limitations given the lack understanding of the dialectical thinking style. Dialectical thinking represents one’s perception of conflicted information. To develop the understanding of dialectical thinking in predicting the persuasiveness of advertising messages, this research uses arguments proposed in the literature and validates the importance of dialectical thinking in predicting advertising appeals’ persuasiveness for East Asian bicultural consumers. In addition to dialectical thinking, Benet-Martinez et al. (2002) proposed the concept of Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) to group biculturals into high Bicultural Identity Integration individuals and low Bicultural Identity Integration individuals. Lau-Gesk (2003)’s work claimed that Chinese Americans who perceive Chinese and American cultures are compatible (high Bicultural Identity Integration) tend to favour ads appeals that emphasizing on both cultural values. Whereas, those individuals who perceive the two cultures are contradicted and compartmentalised tend to favour ads appeals that emphasizing on only one cultural value. This research aims to examine the role of product type in moderating the relationship between Bicultural Identity Integration and the persuasiveness of dual-focused advertising appeals. Building upon marketing and psychology literature, the aim of this research is to extend our understanding of impacts of dialectical thinking and Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) on the persuasiveness of dual-focused advertising appeals. This research adopts both qualitative and quantitative techniques to examine the research questions. Firstly, 10 in-depth interviews with Chinese participants from The University of Manchester were conducted to understand the predictors of dialectical thinking. To examine the impacts of dialectical thinking and Bicultural Identity Integration on the persuasiveness of dual-focused advertising appeals, 161 participants were recruited in Experiment 1 and 164 participants were recruited in Experiment 2. The findings suggest that individuals’ perspective-taking and flexibility and openness capabilities tend to predict one’s degree of dialecticism. In Experiment 1, the results showed that dialectical thinking only explains the attitudinal differences among the immigration-based Chinese bicultural group when shared products were promoted. The differences in attitudes among high and low dialectical globalisation-based Chinese biculturals were not significant when either shared or personal products were promoted. Bicultural Identity Integration explains the attitudinal differences within both immigration-based and globalisation-based bicultural groups when shared products were promoted. Experiment 2 results suggested that language cues tend to have a priming effect on immigration-based Chinese biculturals’ degrees of dialecticism. They have shown higher degree of dialecticism when advertising appeals were written in Chinese and are less likely to favour dual-focused advertising appeals; participants also reported lower degree of dialecticism when advertising appeals were written in English and favour dual-focused advertising appeals. However, such priming effects were not significant within the globalisation-based Chinese bicultural group.

Second-generation immigrants are increasingly embracing their biculturalism, equally identifying as American and "other" (Yazykova & McLeigh, 2015). While this allows for ethnic diversity as well as other social and linguistic advantages, the internalization of two different cultures has been linked to causing tensions related to identity development and mental health (Huynh et al., 2018; Ceri et al., 2017; Ritsner & Ponizovsky, 1999). Previous research has shown a link between parental support and an individual's acculturation and psychological well-being (Pawliuk et al., 1996; Abad & Sheldon, 2008). This study seeks to further examine the influence of family on the bicultural identity integration and psychological distress in second-generation immigrants. Researchers recruited 39 participants to explore the relationship of family life satisfaction, family social support, bicultural harmony and blendedness, and self-reported symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. A bivariate correlation analysis showed that satisfaction with family life was negatively associated with depression, stress, and overall psychological distress. In addition, perceived social support from family appeared to have a positive relationship to higher scores of depression. Researchers also found that bicultural identity integration had a negative relationship with anxiety, stress, and overall psychological distress.

Att veta vem man är i en värld fylld av normer och regler kan vara en kamp för många. Vad identitet betyder beror på vem som tillfråggas vilket även skiner ljus på den komplexitet som existerar kring detta ämne. Denna undersökning utfördes i syftet att komma närmare upplevelsen av identitetsskapande hos unga svenskfödda individer med utländsk bakgrund. Åtta intervjuer genomfördes med unga individer mellan 20-24 år. En tematisk analys gav fyra teman som visade att upplevelsen av identitetsskapande hos unga svenskfödda individer med bikulturell identitet differentierar och att det finns både för- och nackdelar. I de svårigheter som representerades förekom även en positiv upplevelse av stolthet, och i de möjligheter som representerades förekom även en synlig kamp. Resultatet tydde på att bikulturella individer behöver känna sig accepterade och få synas som en individ utöver den bikulturella identiteten.

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La tesi si focalizza sui processi di costruzione dell’identità in adolescenti e giovani adulti in adozione internazionale analizzandone l’influenza sul benessere. L’approccio quantitativo e l’assunzione di una prospettiva familiare caratterizzano l’impianto di ricerca dei quattro studi che compongono questa ricerca. Il primo studio tratteggia un quadro della famiglia adottiva di fronte all’adolescenza dei figli adottivi prendendone esaminandone dimensioni specifiche a livello individuale, relazionale e sociale. Il secondo studio identifica una tipologia identitaria di adottati alla luce dei pattern di identificazione etnica e nazionale che discrimina rispetto alla qualità della relazione familiare, benessere e motivazioni identitarie dell’adottato. Il terzo studio evidenzia l’influenza di alcune variabili familiari e sociali sui processi identitari degli adottati ed analizza come i diversi esiti identitari siano legati al benessere. Il quarto studio si focalizza sulla socializzazione culturale e la percezione di discriminazione quali predittori della costruzione dell’identità etnica in Italia e negli U.S.A, mettendo in evidenza aspetti comuni e differenze culturali specifiche. Dai risultati emerge che il legame tra il benessere e la capacità di confrontarsi con la duplice appartenenza al proprio gruppo etnico e al nuovo contesto sociale di appartenenza. I genitori assumono un ruolo fondamentale nel sostenere tale processo tramite le strategie di socializzazione culturale. / This work is focused on the identity process among adolescents and young adults internationally adopted and their well-being. The four studies that compose this dissertation are characterize by the quantitative approach and the assumption of a family perspective. The first study explore well-being, ethnic identity, family relations and the perception of social context among adoptees and their parents. The second study identifies a type of identity of adoptees for different patterns of ethnic identification and national. The type of adoptees shows differences with respect to the quality of family relations, well-being and multiple motives on identity construction. The third study develops a model of the explanatory factors determining the adoptees well-being; it confirms the influence of some family and social variables on identity processes and assess whether adoptees’ identity is related to psychosocial well-being. The fourth study is focused on the perception of cultural socialization and discrimination as predictors of ethnic identity in Italy and the USA, highlighting common aspects and specific cultural differences. The results show that family relations and the degree of integration between two cultural identities are important protective factors for psychosocial adjustment and well-being of adoptees. Parents play a vital role in supporting this process through cultural socialization strategies.