Assessment of acculturation

Introduction Methodological issues are important in acculturation research. The quality of inferences based on our studies can be bolstered by using adequate, up-to-date methods. The present chapter deals with two methodological issues: the design of acculturation studies and procedures to assess acculturation. A leading theme of this chapter is that a careful choice of methodological aspects of a study, such as study and instrument design, can go a long way to enhancing the quality of acculturation studies. Both the design and assessment issues are core topics in cross-cultural psychology. However, we do not discuss this more general methodological literature or specific assessment instruments here. These issues are addressed elsewhere: for the design of cross-cultural studies, see Van de Vijver (2015) and Van de Vijver and Leung (1997); for test adaptations and translations, see Hambleton, Merenda, and Spielberger (2005); for the increasingly popular combination of qualitative and quantitative procedures, known as mixed methods, see Tashakkori and Teddlie, (2003); for overviews of acculturation measures, see Berry, Trimble, and Olmedo (1986), Celenk and Van de Vijver (2011, 2014), Matsudaira (2006), and Rudmin (2009). In the last 30 years, acculturation research has diversified. The prototypical acculturation study examined a single ethnic group that had moved to another country. This type of study is nowadays only one of the many kinds reported in the literature. As noted in Chapter 2, the diversification of the field has added to the complexity of the issues to be addressed in the field. For example, the terms that were used previously have become less adequate; hence we provide here a note on the terminology to clarify our use of terms (see Figure 2.2 for a description of the various kinds of acculturating groups). First, the term mainstream culture refers to the culture of the dominant group(s) in a society. In one kind of society, there is clearly one such group (e.g., Germans in Germany). In many other countries the context of acculturation may be ethnically diverse (e.g., in societies where many groups have come to live together, labeled super-diversity; Vertovec, 2007); an example is London, which used the slogan the “world in one city” in the 2012 Olympics bid to indicate that every nation of the world is represented in the population of London