Acculturation of Korean Multicultural Christian College Students

The current study uses qualitative and quantitative data to explore the acculturation of Korean college students into an American Christian college, with attention to their cultural patterns (Triandis & Gelfand, 1998), the ethics that participants express (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997), and the values that they hold (Schwartz, 1992, 1994, 2011). Fifty individuals-25 multicultural Koreans and 25 monolingual Americans-were surveyed and interviewed in English. In response to the survey, which consisted of the 16 Scenarios for the Measurement of Collectivism and Individualism (which measures horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998), Americans showed higher levels of horizontal individualism than the Koreans. In response to the interviews, which were made up of two questions developed by Arnett, Ramos, and Jensen (2001) that were coded for Shweder's ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity as well as for Schwartz's universal values, Americans favored the values of benevolence whereas multicultural Koreans favored security. Both groups of participants valued tradition but understood this value distinctively.Acculturation is the "phenomenon which results when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact," with subsequent changes primarily in the cultural patterns of one group (Berry, 1997, p. 7). Acculturation is a multifaceted concept, and one may adapt in some areas but not in others. True assimilation (the highest level of acculturation, defined as rejection of one's birth culture and adoption of the cultural norms of the dominant culture, Berry, 1997) may never occur (Trimble, 2003). Most studies of individual acculturation have not examined the acculturation of values (Kim, Yang, Atkinson, Wolfe, & Hong, 2001; Marin & Gamba, 2003), instead exploring mental or physical health, but the acculturation of values, despite the challenges of developing adequate measures, deserves further attention. The current study uses qualitative and quantitative data to explore the acculturation of Korean college students into an American Christian college, with attention to their cultural patterns (Triandis & Gelfand, 1998), the ethics that participants express (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997), and the values that they hold (Schwartz, 1992, 1994, 2011). In a widely known description of two basic psychological domains by which cultures can be described, Triandis and Gelfand (1998) identified two major types of cultural patterns: individualism and collectivism. Individualism refers to cultures which value a personal definition of the self, give personal goals priority, emphasize exchange in relationships, and emphasize rationality rather than relatedness, whereas collectivist cultures value in-group goals and an interdependent sense of self. These two basic cultural patterns provide a way for thinking about the distinctive values of the American and Korean cultures.Further, within both individualistic and collectivistic cultures, Triandis and Gelfand (1998) differentiate between horizontal and vertical patterns of the culture, depending on the dominant social values in the culture. In cultures with horizontal patterns, individuals value equality and assum that one self is more or less like every other self; in vertical pattern, hierarchy is valued and "one self is different from other selves" (p. 119). These horizontal and vertical patterns-with their different emphases on equality and hierarchy-combine with individualism and collectivism to produce four distinct patterns by which some components of cultural values can be captured: horizontal individualism, vertical individualism, horizontal collectivism, and vertical collectivism. Using these four categories, Korea has been identified as a culture which values horizontal individualism and collectivism equally, whereas the United States has been identified as a horizontal individualist culture (Triandis & Gelfland, 1998). …