Immigration, Acculturation, And Adaptation

Above is a model showing the four different types of acculturating, from Berry’s “Immigration, Acculturation, and Adaptation” Journal of Applied Psychology (1997). This diagram shows the different responses to acculturation, where the value of maintaining ‘old’ culture is essentially balanced with exposure and adaptations to ‘new’ cultures. These choices of one response over another can drastically change, depending on the shifting of stressors that contribute to the responses. The four types of acculturating strategies, outlined by John Berry, are assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization which span cross-culturally on the sociocultural level of analysis. These variations of acculturation strategies “ consist of two (usually

In order for integration to achieve, there must be an acceptance between two or more cultural groups (usually in multicultural areas). To fully explain integration, individuals must consider that integration not always creates a positive and engaging impact, but can create negative environments. Integration is the most competent and adaptive strategy because it positively provides benefits to cultures with mutual accommodation. Compared with the other acculturation strategies, integration is associated with lower levels of risk behavior and more positive attitudes, and better psychological and sociocultural outcomes in youth. In Berry’s (2011) study, most students chose integration as their efficacious strategy of acculturation, because statistics show that the majority of the students do not deliberately separate or integrate from the German society (Yu & Wang, 2011). Young children and adolescents who use integration can help reduce feelings of loss and grief as the migrant start to incorporate aspects of the majority culture (Bhugra & Becker, 2005). Another example of how integration is consistently adaptive is when a Vietnamese American migrant in the United States might be fluent in both English and Vietnamese, advocate individualistic values in some contexts and collectivistic values in other contexts, and pinpoints

Separating creates a tremendous impact because it involves rejection of the dominant culture (perhaps reciprocated by them) (Berry 1997). Separation occurs immediately after individuals adapt to new cultural and behavioral norms, but sometimes involve culture exuviation without culture learning. In many studies, for example, Berry’s (2011) study on Chinese students migrating to Germany, males prefer separation because separation is empowered by a dominant society, and in this study, the males empowered the women (Yu & Wang, 2011). Therefore, separation is only allowed when cultures involvement with others. This results in marginalization, where the individual does not identify with or participate either his or own host culture or own