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Immigrants' acculturative strategies: Their psychological meaning

Abstract:

The study analyzes the association between acculturative strategies of immigrants in Spain and their individual values, trying to understand the psychological meaning of those strategies for individuals. The study uses the data of 1252 foreign immigrants (Brazil = 98, Colombia = 296, Ecuador = 325, Eastern Europe = 76, Arabian Countries = 365, Sub-Saharan Africa = 92) with their mean length of residence being of 4.3 years, and mean age of 32.6. We compare the predominance of different types of values in the four acculturative strategies -integration, separation, assimilation, and marginalizationfor both attitudinal and behavioural levels. The results show that separation could be described best as a position of group conservation without the promotion of the ingroup within the receiving society, integration could be described as a promotion strategy, and assimilation appears clearly as an individual mobility strategy and openness to a new culture. It was not possible to establish a motivational or value profile of marginalization, probably due to the fact that our instrument does not differentiate between the "cosmopolitan" subtype of this strategy and the subtype that describes the situation of social exclusion. © 2008 Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje.