Acculturation and social attitudes among majority children

Abstract

Article (Unspecified) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Aronson, Krista Maywalt and Brown, Rupert (2013) Acculturation and social attitudes among majority children. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 37 (3). pp. 313-322. ISSN 0147-1767 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/52956/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. a b s t r a c tContemporary research emphasises the dynamic intergroup nature of acculturation processes involving both immigrants and nationals. Using data from a sample of 372 U.S. national children (aged 6-9 years), we examine the relationship between acculturation attitudes, conceptualized as desire for cultural maintenance and desire for intergroup contact between immigrants and nationals, and attitudes towards Somali immigrants (intended behaviour, prejudice, perceived norms and intergroup anxiety). Prosocial behaviours were highest among children who simultaneously endorsed cultural maintenance and intergroup contact attitudes. These findings and their implications are discussed.

Telling tales in school: extended contact interventions in the classroom

“…However, the current findings are equivocal regarding whether one extended contact message is more effective than another: dual identity was associated with the highest behavioral intention scores in the United States; but, dual identity and common group messages were associated with equally positive outcomes within the Italian sample. These results somewhat mirror the extended contact research landscape in which some research links dual identity messages with the most positive outcomes (Cameron et al, ), and the endorsement of acculturative attitudes that emphasize both contact with mainstream culture and cultural maintenance (integration) with prosocial intergroup attitudes and behavioral intentions among majority children (Aronson & Brown, ), whereas other findings do not distinguish between common group or dual identity messages (Cameron, Rutland, Turner, et al, ). For instance, Cameron Rutland, Turner, et al () speculate that common group messages may be equally effective in environments where the minority group category is already salient for children, predisposing them to consider both superordinate and subordinate categories during story reading.…”

Acculturation strategies and attitudes and their relationship with the identification of descendants of migrants in the Catalan school context

“…Hierarchical and K Means cluster analyses were conducted to explore the acculturation profiles of youngsters of migrant background living in Catalonia. Cluster analysis was chosen, rather than median split, because it identifies emergent patterns in the data instead of imposing an a priori structure (Aronson and Brown 2013). The cluster analysis was based on participants' answers to nine variables regarding the maintenance of their culture of origin and the adoption of the Catalan and the Spanish cultures in the context of education.…”

“…According to previous studies (e.g. Aronson and Brown 2013;Brown, Gibbons, and Hughes 2013), the first step of the analysis consisted of a hierarchical cluster analysis using Ward's method on squared Euclidean distances to determine the number of clusters that best fitted the data. The optimal number of clusters was found to be four.…”

Untitled

“…Acculturation refers to processes of cultural adjustments that occur due to prolonged contact between groups of people that are culturally different (Berry 1997). It was previously viewed as a one-way process where migrants abandoned their cultural beliefs and values and adopted those of their host country (Aronson and Brown 2013;Schwartz, Unger, Zamboanga and Szapocznik 2010). Research has shown, however, that acquiring the beliefs, values, and practices of the host country does not automatically imply that migrants discard those of their country of origin (Schwartz et al 2010), and a number of conceptual models of acculturation have been adopted in order to explain the changes that take place when different groups of people and individuals are interacting (Berry 1980;Kramer 2012).…”