Summary of PhD Research ENG (1136534), страница 2
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At the group level, acculturation changesencompass demographic, cultural, political and economic changes that can range fromrelatively minor changes in the way of life of both groups to significant ones; changes atthe population level provide the basis for individual changes (Berry, Poortinga,Breugelmans, Chasiotis, & Sam, 2011). At the individual level, acculturation is a dynamicand complex process that covers changes in behavior, language, identity, values, and socialrelationships and includes a set of preferences about how to behave in the process ofacculturation, so-called acculturation strategies / orientations / preferences / attitudes thathave often a significant relationship with behaviors (Arends-Tóth & van de Vijver, 2006).According to the famous taxonomy by Berry (1997), acculturation strategies requireimmigrants to answer both issues: maintaining their own culture and adopting a dominantculture.
Maintenance one's own culture but refusing to accept a dominant culture isseparation strategy. In opposite, adoption of a dominant culture but refusing to maintainone's own culture is assimilation strategy. Simultaneously orientation to both cultures: themaintenance of one's own culture and adoption of a dominant culture is integration strategy.Also, the answer to these issues are about two spheres of acculturation: private and public(Arends-Tóth & van de Vijver, 2003) or peripheral and central (Navas et al., 2005).
Forinstance, the public sphere may include such domains, e.g., as work, social relations andfriendship, and language; private sphere may include such domains, e.g., as consumerhabits, family relationships, religious beliefs and customs, and values and principles. Inother words, acculturation is also a domain-specific process; acculturation is situated in anecological context, and should therefore be considered as a context-specific process (Ward& Geeraert, 2016), as proposed in the Ecological Acculturation Framework (e.g., Birman,Simon, Chan, & Tran, 2014; Salo & Birman, 2015) and the Relative AcculturationExtended Model (RAEM) (Navas et al., 2005).
It has been suggested that contextspecificity can take the form of domain dependence of acculturation orientations andbehaviors.Individual differences in the psychological characteristics that persons bring to theprocess of acculturation lead towards adaptation, which is consequences that occur withindividuals or groups in response to the demands of the external environment (Berry, 1997).Adaptation may both lead to a mutual fit between the individual and the environment ornot. Searle and Ward (1990) were the first to distinguish between psychological andsociocultural adaptation. Later, Aycan and Berry (1996) also began to consider economicadaptation, which they defined as full participation in economic life in Canada byachieving a certain level of income and matching planned and achieved financial goals.Marital adaptation can also be one of the basic aspects of adaptation, married couples arestudied in the process of acculturation as a whole (Ataca & Berry, 2002).
In modern studiesof adaptation, socio-economic adaptation is also increasingly identified, which is seen as amore extended variant of the economic adaptation of the previously proposed by Aycanand Berry (1996) (see, e.g., Besevegis & Pavlopoulos, 2008; Jasinskaja-Lahti, 2008;Jasinskaja-Lahti, Horenczyk, & Kinunen, 2011). Socio-economic adaptation can bedefined as the outcome that allows immigrants to participate well in the social andeconomic life of the host society (Grigoryev & Berry, 2017).
This aspect of adaptation isalso associated with psychological and sociocultural adaptation (Jasinskaja-Lahti, 2008).Contemporary research shows that the majority of immigrants leave for anothercountry primarily for economic reasons. For example, Ward, Bochner, and Furnham (2001)have noted that, in spite of the sustained ambition of immigrants to gain financial security,they face serious obstacles; achieving economic success is more complicated for them thanfor natives. During the process of immigration to another country, a process which is oftenaccompanied by considerable costs and risks, immigrants frequently become unemployedor have to work part-time.
Particular difficulties are related to unacceptable housingconditions, unemployment, low income, discrimination, social exclusion, lowersocioeconomic status (SES), and a low quality of life (Wong, Chou, & Chow, 2012). Evenwhen immigrants manage to find a job, they are usually in an unequal position compared tonatives (Winter-Ebmer, 1994). The first employment, even for highly educated immigrants,often belongs to non-prestigious employment in the so-called “secondary labor market”(e.g.
cleaning services, construction work, etc.). Such employment is characterized by lowlanguage proficiency requirements and thus low incomes, fixed-term contracts and limitedopportunities for career growth (Haberfeld, Semyonov, & Cohen, 2000; Forsander,Salmenhaara, Melegh, & Kondrateva, 2007). An increasing number of studies aim to helpfacilitate the adaptation of immigrants and to improve their quality of life (van der Zee &Sandal, 2016; Wong, Chou, & Chow, 2012).
Nevertheless, the subject of socio-economicadaptation in general has been little studied (Hayfron, 2006; Jasinskaja-Lahti, 2008).Moreover, previous studies often focused on employment as the only socioeconomicadjustment outcome, which is a poor rendering of all possibly relevant socioeconomicindicators and limits our understanding of the process. Socioeconomic adaptation enablesimmigrants to completely participate in the social and economic life of the host society,involving multiple indicators (see Grigoryev 2015; Grigoryev & Berry, 2017; Grigoryev &van de Vijver, 2017).In general, summarizing existing research it is possible to identify and classifyseveral of the main factors that may associate with the socio-economic adaptation ofimmigrants (Grigoryev, 2015) based on an empirically tested (Potocky-Tripodi, 2003)theoretical model of the economic adaptation of refugees (see Kuhlman, 1991): (1) sociodemographic characteristics of immigrants (e.g., gender, age, education, ethnicity, familycomposition, etc.); (2) characteristics of stay in a country (e.g, length of stay, initialconditions of immigrants, travel and movement within a host country, etc.); (3) noneconomic and psychological aspects of immigrants (e.g., level of language proficiency,acculturation strategies, attitudes towards social mobility and change of residence, etc.); (4)characteristics of a host society and country (e.g., economic conditions, ethnic composition,social and cultural distance, attitudes towards immigration and immigrants, etc.); and (5)state policy on immigrants (e.g., availability of quotas and benefits, legal rights, work ofinstitutions, level of corruption, etc.).
If the first three groups refer to internal factors thatare associated with immigrants themselves, then the last two groups constitute externalconditions for adaptation that do not directly depend on immigrants. At the individual level,issues of acculturation are covered by the first four groups of factors.A few models address intergroup attitudes and their ramifications for acculturationpreferences of both groups (e.g., Bourhis, Moïse, Perreault, & Senécal, 1997; Navas et al.,2005; Piontkowski, Rohmann, & Florack, 2002), since acculturation takes place on twosides, that is, majority group members are also involved in this process when immigrants inlarge numbers come in a country.
Majority group members also have preferences as to howimmigrants should behave, so-called acculturation expectations. These preferences mayalso be varied depending on the private or public domains. Majority group members mayexpect for assimilation in some domains (e.g., workplace) and integration into others (e.g.,values). They have some representations (subjective assessment) about how immigrantsbehave in their life in a host country concerning these issues for each domain, and theseones can be far from the real state of affairs. The mismatch between these views ofmajority group members and their expectations about the behavior of immigrants mayprovoke a perceived threat from immigrants, a lack of willingness to contact, and thendiscrimination against immigrants, and conflicts (Piontkowski, Rohmann, & Florack,2002).
Discrimination makes difficult for immigrants to adapt and, as a consequence, tointegrate into a host society. The difficulty in adapting immigrants may lead to variousnegative consequences for both immigrants themselves, and for a society and economy of ahost country; discrimination of immigrants in the socioeconomic domains (e.g., workplace,labor market, rental of housing, etc.) is the most serious in its consequences (OECD, 2013).OverviewIn the following after this overview of the field of my research project, I brieflyprovide the studies descriptions. In the first part of my research project (study 1 and study2), a sample of first-generation of Russian-speaking immigrants (N = 132), aged 19 to 65years (M = 35.9; SD = 9.3), with various lengths of stay in Belgium (from 2 months to 18years (M = 7.1; SD = 5.0) and all of them arrived from Russia to Belgium) was considered.On the whole, I referred a question what consequences for the socioeconomic adaptation ofRussian-speaking immigrants in Belgium have their different acculturation orientations? Iexamined their orientation toward the host society (integration and assimilation),orientation toward their own ethnic group (separation) in basic life domains, the durationof their stay in the host country, and interaction between these factors, by using acombination of person-oriented and variable-oriented approaches (see Bergman &Magnusson, 1997; Bergman & Trost, 2006) and an extended measure of socioeconomicadaptation.
From this point of view, the use of grouping methods, such as a cluster analysisor latent class analysis, can be regarded as an appropriate approach to acculturation if thegroup of individuals would comprise subgroups who deal with acculturation issues in adifferent manner; grouping procedures allow the identification of such subgroups.According to the OECD (2008; 2015), Belgium has one of the larger immigrantcommunities in Europe, with more than 12% foreign-born in the population. Belgium has ahigh living standard and a stable economy that attracts large numbers of immigrants eachyear, and few immigrants return to Russia from Belgium (Corluy, Pina, & Verbist 2015;OECD, 2008; 2015).
Still, labor market outcomes for immigrants in Belgium tend to bepoor. Employment rates are low in international comparison, particularly for immigrantsfrom non-EU countries. Unemployment is also high, and immigrants’ unemployment isalmost two and a half times higher than that of the native population.
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