Second Generation East and Southeast Asian Immigrants Bicultural Identity Integration and Well-Being: A Domain-Specific Approach
Creators: name: Chan, Kaki Jacky
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2022
Subjects: Biculturalism
Bicultural identity integration
Well-being
Immigrants

description: The overarching objective of the thesis was to better understand how second generation (G2) East and Southeast Asian emerging adult immigrants make sense of their bicultural identity integration (BII), and in turn experience well-being. Moreover, a domain-specific approach was adopted with the premise that an individual could experience a great deal of well-being in one context (e.g., at home) while encountering significant difficulties in adjustment in another (e.g., in the public sphere). To achieve this, two studies were completed as part of the thesis. In the first study, we focused on family domain adjustment and well-being. In particular, we were interested how parental autonomy support (proxy for individualism) and family allocentrism (proxy for collectivism) were related to participants’ parent-child relationship satisfaction, parent-child relationship conflict, and family-domain subjective well-being. We were also interested in how BII may explain the above relationships through mediation pathways. In the second study, the focus shifted towards community-domain adjustment. Research questions were formulated around the relationships between cultural socialization (independent variable [IV] 1), experiences with microaggressions (IV 2), and sense of belonging to heritage cultural community (dependent variable [DV] 1) and mainstream Canadian community (DV 2). Again, BII was included in the model to determine its ability to explain the above pathways. The results from study 1 revealed that parental autonomy support was positively related to family domain-specific well-being for all participants. Family allocentrism was linked with parent-child relationship satisfaction, but only for participants who had moved away from parents. BII appeared to partially explain the relationship between family allocentrism and parent-child conflict. The results from study 2 revealed that co-ethnic peer cultural socialization towards East and Southeast Asian culture had a positive relationship with participants’ sense of belonging to their heritage community. Meanwhile, parental and Euro-Canadian peer cultural socialization towards Canadian culture had positive relationships with participants’ sense of belonging to the dominant Canadian community. Not surprisingly, microaggressions were negatively linked with participants’ sense of belonging to heritage and Canadian communities. The results from the mediation model again suggested that BII was able to partially explain the link between microaggressions and sense of belonging to heritage and dominant communities. Moreover, BII also appeared to be able to explain some of the relationships between cultural socialization and participants’ sense of belonging. Taken together, the findings from the two studies shed light on how BII may subtly influence well-being differently across the home and community spheres, reinforcing the need to look at BII from a situated approach. Implications for clinicians on how to best support G2 East and Southeast Asian emerging adult immigrants navigating their bicultural identity and experience well-being are discussed.