Acculturative stress in modern Maori adolescence.

Abstract

To anyone concerned with cross-cultural and dynamic aspects of adolescent personality development, modern Maori culture offers almost unlimited research opportunities. With the onset of adolescence in Western culture, children are expected to strive more for primary status based on their own efforts, competence, and performance ability and to strive less for derived status predicated on their personal qualities and on their dependent relationship to and intrinsic acceptance by parents, relatives, and peers. Concomitantly, in support of this shift in the relative importance and availability of primary and derived status, adolescents are expected to be less dependent than children on the approval of their elders, to play a more active role in formulating their own goals, and to relate more intimately to peers than to parents. They are also under greater pressure to persevere in goal striving despite serious setbacks, to postpone immediate hedonistic gratification in favor of achieving long range objectives, and to exercise more initiative, foresight, executive independence, responsibility, and selfdiscipline (2). But what happens to adolescent development in cultures such as the Maori where the importance of derived status is not de-emphasized to the same extent during and after adolescence as is customary in Western civi-