After 18, family influence still key to one's ethnic identity

Sunday, February 07, 2010

11:38 PM

After 18, family influence still key to one's ethnic

identity
February 1st, 2010 in Other Sciences / Social Sciences
The formative years don't stop at 18 according to a new study that found the actions and lifestyle
of the family continue to influence whether young adults embrace their ethnicity and take pride in
their roots. Published in the Journal of Adolescence, the study of young adults between the ages
of 18 and 30 found that those whose families continue to teach them about their ethnic
background had a greater sense of ethnic identity.
Individuals whose families actively share cultural customs and traditions with them, celebrating Chinese
New Year for example, reported feeling more attached to their ethnic group and spent more time
exploring their heritage.
"These results highlight the fact that cultural education is an important aspect of parenting," said the
study's author Linda Juang, associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. "The
influence of the family continues to shape young people's ethnic identity beyond adolescence."
Juang surveyed more than 200 adults between the ages of 18 and 30, including Asian Americans,
Latinos, white individuals and those of mixed ethnicity. Early adulthood is thought to be a critical time for
identity development. Psychologists are interested in how ethnic identity is formed since research has
associated a strong sense of ethnic identity with greater life satisfaction and decreased depression.
The study found that the family's role in communicating cultural practices and traditions had a greater
influence on young adults' exploration of their ethnicity compared with whether they adopted values
associated with their ethnic group. "Parents may be effective in prompting their children to find out more
about their culture but they can't necessarily instill the values of their culture," Juang said.
The results also suggest that the relationship between the family's influence and ethnic identity is more
pronounced for females than males. This is consistent with previous research suggesting that parents
tend to focus on passing on cultural traditions to daughters more than sons.
More information: The study was recently published online in the Journal of Adolescence and will be
published in the August 2010 print issue.
Provided by San Francisco State University

Ins erted from <http://www.physorg.com/print184252810.html>

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Korean adoptees in US seek identity via peers or cultural
exploration
Sunday, February 07, 2010
11:44 PM

Korean adoptees in US seek identity via peers or

cultural exploration
March 19th, 2008 in Other Sciences / Other
Finding out "Who am I?" for Korean adoptees, many of them orphaned, following the Korean War
in the 1950s was a struggle when adulthood hit for many in the 1970s, but the road has since
gotten smoother with exploration of their ethnic identities following two basic paths, say
University of Oregon sociologists.
The two roads -- usually one or the other, but rarely both -- have been through extended social exposure
with their Asian peers or by reaching out to learn about their cultural heritage, most often while pursuing
higher education, said Jiannbin "J" Lee Shiao, a professor of sociology and associate director of ethnic
studies.
Shiao and co-author Mia H. Tuan, director of the UO Center on Diversity and Community, reported their
findings in the American Journal of Sociology (January). The study focused on early adulthood memories
of adoptees that had been among the earliest wave of Koreans into the United States. It was a study,
Shiao and Tuan wrote, that shows "ethnic exploration exemplifies how the persistence of ethnicity can
depend on the individual negotiation of racial inequality."
The researchers interviewed 58 adoptees, ages 25 to 51, recruited from international adoption-placement
records. The participants had been placed into West Coast homes in California, Oregon and Washington
between 1950 and 1975. The study, which includes numerous excerpts of participants' responses, is part
of a book the two authors are writing on the adoptees' experiences.
"By studying older adults, we're getting a baseline for what younger, more recent adoptees might face in
their later adult lives," Shiao said. "We found that social context, the situation in which adoptees spend
early adulthood, shapes what kind of exploration they do and the identities they come out with. Those
who don't explore, by choice or by lack of opportunity, often emerge with an identity that is not too
different than growing up thinking of themselves as honorary whites. The difference being they may have
had nagging concerns or they spend their lives minimizing things that come up in their life -- that has
nothing to do with me, or that's not really me."
In the 1970s, adoptees entering adulthood (from age 18 to the early 20s) were faced with a time period
when being Asian was highly stigmatized and there were few opportunities to explore their ethnic identity,
Shiao said. The 1980s and beyond gradually improved the racial climate and long-range opportunities to
explore, he added.
Twenty-six of the 58 participants did not explore their ethnicity during early adulthood. Most of the
reasons involving lack of opportunity were tied to living in racially homogeneous workplaces and
communities and family or life responsibilities. Some cited a lack of interest, specifically an aversion to
Asians and Asian-Americans or a disinterest in racial differences. The remaining subjects chose to
explore and were split between the social exposure and cultural heritage tracks.
The route chosen by adoptees led to one of two kinds of language, Shiao said. "If they explore and share
experiences with their ethnic peers, they develop a racial language of discrimination or being part of a
minority group," he said, adding that these relationships promoted bonding that carried into later adult
years. "For those who pursue cultural exploration, their identity tends to become a symbolic attachment to
their international heritage, which is not that salient in their daily lives."
Travel abroad might seem like the most extensive form of exploration, "but in actuality it's also the one
that makes them feel more like Americans than anything else," Shiao said. "It can make them feel more
like adoptees than Asians. They go out of the world they know. They may initially feel like they are going
home and can wonder what their life could have been, but instead they experience a strong form of
culture shock."
Adoptees either sought social exposure through others like themselves or sought information on their
cultural heritage to learn something about their foreign origins. "And you'd think that those two things
could go hand in hand, that people might want to do both, but what we found was that most people chose
to do one or the other," he said.
Some adoptees indicated that they had not explored their cultural identities or only did so superficially,
but, Shiao said, "looking deeper into the data, we found that they had actually done their exploring while
in high school."
A lot of previous research on ethnic identity focused on the adolescent years, and was done by
psychologists and sociologists studying teenagers in racially and ethnically diverse high schools rather

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than in the predominantly white schools that most adoptees attend, Shiao said.
"Early adulthood is an important time, because these individuals are nominally independent from their
parents, and as a result are on their and must create some of their own social networks," he said. "This
time period is very big period, dividing those who go to college and those who don't. Those who don't go
to college tend to enter social and work worlds that remain similar to those they had in high school. Those
who go on to college have less employment, and they have time to do more exploration, often through
classes, personal associations, clubs and study abroad."
Source: University of Oregon

Ins erted from <http://www.physorg.com/print125149221.html>

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