A Test of the Intergenerational Congruence in Immigrant Families--Child Scale with Southeast Asian Americans

Abstract

A common challenge facing immigrant families is intergenerational-intercultural conflict. Social workers are in need of an easy-to-use but psychometrically sound measure to assess this phenomenon and evaluate treatment effectiveness. The Intergenerational Congruence in Immigrant Families (ICIF) Scale was created for this purpose. The ICIF has two parallel versions, one to assess the perspective of the parent (ICIF-Parent Scale) and the other to assess the perspective of the adolescent or young adult children of immigrants (ICIF-Child Scale, or ICIF-CS) of the intergenerational relationship. As Southeast Asian American refugee families are at increased risk of intergenerational-intercultural conflict, the current study assesses the psychometric properties of the ICIF-CS in 188 Southeast Asian American college students with refugee parents. The ICIF-CS was found to be a unidimensional measure with high internal reliability. Its construct validity was supported by its positive association with parental attachment and self-esteem and negative association with family conflict and depressive symptom level. KEY WORDS: intergenerational congruence; intergenerational relationship; migrant families; Southeast Asian Americans ********** At the dawn of the 21st century, more people than ever are migrating in search of a better life. This is particularly evident in the United States, where 12% of the population is non-native born (Mareh, 2005). Furthermore, one of every five American children grows up in an immigrant-headed household (Capps, Fix, Ost, Reardon-Anderson, & Passel, 2004). Among Asian Americans, the fastest growing ethnic minority group in the United States, two-thirds are either immigrants or refugees (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). Consequently, almost nine in every 10 Asian American youths (88%) are raised by overseas-born parents (Zhou & Bankston, 1998). An extensive literature has shown that differential acculturation between migrant parents and their offspring results in intergenerational-intercultural conflict (Kwak, 2003; Sluzki, 1979). This conflict holds significant negative mental health consequences for both migrants and their children (Kwak). For social workers to serve such families effectively, psychometrically sound measures of intergenerational conflict are needed. The Intergenerational Congruence in Immigrant Families-Child and Parent Scales (ICIF-CS and ICIF-PS, respectively) were constructed to address this gap in the literature (Ying, Lee, & Tsai, 2004; Ying & Tracy, 2004). The ICIF assesses intergenerational congruence across various domains and satisfaction with the parent-child relationship from the perspective of both the adolescent or young adult child (ICIF-CS) and the immigrant parent (ICIF-PS), regardless of culture of origin. Earlier research has demonstrated the psychometric properties of these scales in Chinese American immigrant parents (Ying & Tracy) and adolescent children of immigrants (Ying et al., 2004). The current study extends the literature on the use of the ICIF with other migrant groups by focusing on Southeast Asian refugee families. Recent research has documented the intergenerational transmission of trauma in Southeast Asian refugee families where traumatized parents form insecure attachments with their children, who in turn exhibit lowered competence and psychological well-being (Han, 2006). Thus, it is particularly important to assess intergenerational conflict in this population to assist social work interventions. INTERGENERATIONAL-INTERCULTURAL CONFLICT IN MIGRANT FAMILIES The development of intergenerational-intercultural conflict in migrant families occurs secondarily to differential acculturation between nonnative-born parents and their migrant or U.S.-born children (Sluzki, 1979). Having been socialized in their culture of origin, adult migrants usually prefer to retain those values and acculturate slowly to majority U. …