Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences Weaver / Effects of Generational Status The Effects of Generational Status on the Work Attitudes of Mexican Americans

Responses to 22 surveys representative of the U.S. labor force were used to examine intergenerational differences in seven work attitudes among first- (n = 99), second- (n = 49), and third-generation (n = 26) Mexican Americans and European Americans (n = 11,085). There were only minor differences between the work attitudes of first-generation Mexi-can Americans and the larger population, and by the second generation, differences were virtually nonexistent. The lack of differences may be related to the immigration policies of the United States. The findings add to the accumulating evidence that the work attitudes of Mexican Americans are not meaningfully different from those of the larger population. Evidence (e.g., Forst & Lehman, 1997; Weaver, 2000) has accumulated that the work attitudes of Mexican Americans, as a whole, do not differ mean-ingfully from the work attitudes of the larger population. However, the research on which this evidence is based did not adequately assess the effects of a possibly important variable, acculturation. There are only a few published studies of the effects of acculturation on the work attitudes of Mexican Americans. None were representative of the U.S. labor force. They were based on unrepresentative samples, such as of one or two organizations, and they included participants who were not repre-sentative of the labor force, such as students and military recruits. Most suf-fered from methodological failures, such as low or unreported response rates, no explanation of how ethnic groups were defined, or failure to define ethnic groups correctly, such as combining African Americans and Anglos for com-parison with Mexican Americans when it is well documented (e.g., Weaver