As research into acculturation increases, two competing models have emerged. The unidimensional model posits that heritage and host culture identifications have an inverse relationship, whereas the bidimensional model proposes that the two identifications are orthogonal. In the first study we compared these models in 164 Chinese-Canadian students, and found that the two dimensions were viable and had a distinct pattern of non-inverse correlations with aspects of personality. These findings remained after controlling for basic demographic characteristics. In the second study, we compared the two models in a sample of 157 Chinese-Canadian students, and again found that the two dimensions were viable and had a distinct pattern of non-inverse correlations with self-construal and psychosocial adjustment. The findings for adjustment remained after controlling for extraversion and neuroticism. We argue that, for both conceptual and empirical reasons, the bidimensional model is a more useful conceptualization of acculturation. Implications of these findings are discussed. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

There is a tendency in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), to racialize and criminalize recently-arrived minorities. This acts as a barrier to successful integration between newcomers and host groups. The difficulties inherent in these processes have been exacerbated for Vietnamese settlers through the prominence they gained in the media and public discourse during the Allied War in Vietnam, Operation Babylift and the Private Sponsorship Programme. Through interviews and discourse analysis, I have come to believe that the framing of Vietnamese 'refugee' bodies has provided an extraordinary venue for Canada to produce, naturalize and reify the settler nation as humanitarian, compassionate, enlightened, unified and permanent - as more than we truly are - in a collective forgetting of the less press-worthy of our flaws. This discursive strategy intersects and overdetermines the hi/multicultural settler state while also threatening to undermine it. Thus, to a certain extent, Vietnamese (and other) refugee bodies resignify from receptive, when/where the public is in favour of refugee sponsorship, to criminal, when/where they are not. This discursive 'risky refugee' rides the contradictions of liberal humanitarianism, marginalizing the formerly welcomed and undermining the political will to support the refugee process. There are strong interests in the Lower Mainland of BC who work tirelessly to sponsor and support refugees, despite this fickle nature of self-serving public opinion, pressuring the government to live up to its myth. Meanwhile, Vietnamese people in Vancouver, in general, have struggled and fought to rid themselves of the myths created through pejorative racialization and criminalization. My position in this thesis is that we need to relax this space of very constricted possibilities for negotiations around identity and space, acknowledging refugees as more than just under-educated, potentiallydiseased and probably-criminal Others. Suggestions, in the final chapter, come directly from interview material, as all study participants have had at least 20 years of refugee support and advocacy. The more general conclusion, from theoretical, operational and epistemological perspectives, is that we should work through all our diverse vulnerabilities to re-imagine a multiculturalism more expansive than inclusive. I hope my thesis will challenge the shaky short-term humanitarianism of the liberal state, encouraging a more stable and genuine commitment to refugee support / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis examines the adaptation of Iranian Canadians (immigrants from Iran in Canada) to the new cultural environment with a special focus on a paradigm shift in their lingua-cultural attitudes. More specifically, it examines the attitudes of Iranian Canadians to ta’arof, an important politeness phenomenon in Farsi that has attracted the attention of many scholars of linguistics and anthropology. The actual use of ta’arof as well as attitudes to its use are compared for two groups of first generation Canadian Iranians (60 participants total), with long and short periods of exposure to Canadian culture. All the participants come from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. This thesis is informed by linguistic relativity, acculturation and politeness theories. The study employs a questionnaire survey as its methodology, commonly used in sociolinguistic studies (e.g. Makarova & Hudyma, 2015; Clement, 1986). The questionnaire contains questions about the respondents' use of ta’arof in different situations, and their attitudes to ta’arof. In addition, it included some sociocultural questions aimed at evaluating the respondents’ level of acculturation. The goal of this study is to describe the use of ta’arof and attitudes to its use among first generation Canadian Iranians, as well as to examine whether social variables such as length of stay in Canada, gender, education and English proficiency contribute to a change in attitudes to ta’arof among first generation Iranian immigrants in Canada. The results show that all the social variables in this study, namely age, gender, education, English proficiency, length of stay in Canada and acculturation can be either positively or negatively correlated with the participants’ use of ta’arof and their attitudes to ta’arof. The results also indicate that “ethnic self-identification,” in terms of “Canadian,” “Iranian,” or “Iranian Canadian,” is positively correlated with “the length of stay in Canada.” The Iranian immigrants with longer duration of stay in Canada are more likely to identify themselves as “Iranian Canadian” than as “Iranian.” Other findings suggest that the Iranian immigrants who have lived for a long perid of time in Canada provide higher acculturation-level responses and use ta’arof less in their interactions with Iranians and non-Iranians in Canada, as compared to immigrants who have lived in Canada for a short period of time. The latter group yields lower acculturation-level responses, and their attitudes to ta’arof are significantly more positive. Overall, even though the Iranian Canadian participants report the use ta’arof in Canada not only in communication within the Iranian diaspora, but also sometimes in communication with members of other Canadian ethnic groups, they dislike the pressures imposed by ta’arof, do not want to teach it to their children, and have overall rather negative attitudes towards ta’arof and its use. With the increase of the duration of stay in Canada, the attitudes to ta’arof become significantly more negative.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

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