Mainstream Social Participation Mediates the Relation between Mainstream Cultural Orientation and Language Outcomes

Competence in the mainstream language (L2) plays a critical role in migrants' cultural adaptation to a new society and is closely tied to psychosocial adjustment. A substantial body of work on acculturation and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has shown that migrants with a more positive outlook on the mainstream cultural group report more favourable language outcomes, broadly conceptualized here as “linguistic adjustment”. However, the mechanisms underlying this outlook-language outcomes link have not been fully explored. Targeting this gap, the present research shows that migrants' social participation in the mainstream society (interpersonal interactions and relationships) mediates the relation between cultural orientation toward the mainstream cultural group and L2 outcomes. Five manuscripts, reporting on six studies of multicultural first-generation immigrant students to Montreal, examine different aspects of this mediation model. First, Manuscript 1 discusses in detail the methodological issues facing acculturation research and that informed this dissertation. Second, two manuscripts provide empirical support for both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the relation between mainstream cultural orientation and social participation. Manuscript 2 reports on two longitudinal studies showing that more positive baseline mainstream cultural orientation prospectively predicts greater social participation. Manuscript 3 reports on two studies using a daily diary approach to show that moment-to-moment cultural affiliation during social interactions is related to characteristics of the local context and to mainstream cultural orientation. Third, Manuscript 4 shows that a more interconnected L2 social network, another aspect of mainstream social participation, is associated with lesser communication-related acculturative stress. Finally, Manuscript 5 uses a path analysis and provides evidence supporting the overall mediation model guiding this research. Together, these studies make a strong case for the role of social participation as a mechanism underlying the relation between mainstream cultural orientation and language outcomes. In parallel, this dissertation aims to support two arguments: (1) methodological issues hinder progress in acculturation research and therefore it is essential to go beyond cross-sectional self-report attitudinal scales, and (2) integrating acculturation research in cross-cultural psychology and research on SLA in applied linguistics – two largely separate research strands – would greatly benefit our understanding of migrants' cross-cultural adaptation processes

Mixed-Methods Research: Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to the Psychological Study of Culture.

The study of culture has grown increasingly central to North American psychology over the past several decades as ethnocultural diversity has increased. Confusingly, however, this work is often published within isolated literatures: cross-cultural psychology; several flavors of ‘cultural psychology’; multicultural counselling; and ethnic minority psychology. Psychological anthropologists and transcultural psychiatrists also pose broadly similar questions. While these subdisciplines represent particular intellectual communities with particular histories, a major reason for continuing separation is methodology – in particular, the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods (Ritsher, Ryder, Karasz, & Castille, 2002)

Travels In Hyper-Diversity: Multiculturalism And The Contextual Assessment Of Acculturation

We argue that current acculturation research offers an incomplete picture of the psychological changes taking place in contemporary multicultural societies. Several characteristics of the Canadian multicultural context highlight the limitations in current acculturation research: namely, themes of hyper-diversity, hybridity, dimensionality and the importance of local context. Canada is a case in point, but these themes are generalizable to other contemporary multicultural contexts. To address the limitations of the traditional psychological acculturation paradigm, we propose an innovative research approach to study acculturation: the Cultural Day Reconstruction Method (C-DRM). We report on two studies that implemented this diary method, to demonstrate that this research tool (1) addresses theoretical critiques of current acculturation research and (2) captures some of the complexity of acculturation in contemporary multicultural contexts. The C-DRM was constructed in response to the local research environment but we hope it will become part of a new generation of tools for the contextual assessment of acculturation

Being a droog vs. being a friend: A qualitative investigation of friendship models in Russia vs. Canada

Introduction. A substantial body of work has established that friendship is an important non-kin interpersonal relationship, with many positive outcomes. An issue with this literature is that it originated primarily in anglocentric Euro-American societies, when several studies have shown that the meaning of friendship varies across cultural settings. In particular, linguistic analyses advance that the meaning of friendship in Russian is quite different from that in English. The goal of this study was to seek psychological evidence of these linguistic findings by documenting similarities and differences in people’s understanding of friendship in both cultural contexts. Methods. The research consisted of a qualitative investigation of friendship cultural models among Russian migrants to Canada, through semi-structured interviews that were analysed using an inductive thematic analysis, whereby data segments are coded and codes are gradually refined and streamlined in order to identify the main themes that emerge from the data. Results. Participants’ depictions of friendship in Russian vs. Canadian contexts were largely in line with semantic analyses of friendship in Russian vs. English, with friendship being described as a stronger and deeper bond, but also more demanding in Russia than in Canada. Discussion. The findings support Wierzbicka’s proposal that key terms in a language encapsulate cultural models prevalent among its speakers. The results are also consistent with the existence of close parallels between people’s cultural models and the linguistic ecologies in which they live

Initial Mainstream Cultural Orientations Predict Early Social Participation In The Mainstream Cultural Group

This work adopts a perspective that construes acculturation as a dynamic intergroup process and social contact with members of the new community as a key mechanism underlying cultural adaptation. We argue that migrants' initial self-reported mainstream cultural orientation constitutes an important antecedent of early social participation in the new community. Results from two longitudinal studies of newly arrived international students (N=98 and N=60) show that more positive initial mainstream cultural orientations prospectively predict higher social participation specifically in the mainstream group over the following months. This relation held after controlling for important alternative predictors, namely extraversion/shyness, mainstream language proficiency, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia, a physiological index of social engagement capacity. These studies focus on the very initial stages of the temporal dynamics of acculturation, contribute to bridging research on acculturation and on intergroup relations, and establish a link between cultural orientations, a subjective attitudinal construct, and concrete social engagement behaviors