Cultural involvement and preference in ethnic accommodation

Abstract

The enduring connection between migration and ethnic identity becomes more salient with each passing decade of the 21st century. Ethnic identity often entails a strong migration component bringing people from disparate cultures into new interaction and generating awareness of group distinctions. This close link between migration and ethnic identity suggests that social science tools used to study one of these subjects may prove useful in studying the other. In this spirit, we apply concepts originating in the study of immigrant acculturation to the wider subject of ethnic accommodation. A continuous-case approach applies Berry's bi-dimensional theoretical perspective on acculturation using measures of cultural involvement and cultural preference for respondents from a range of different ethnic groups. These groups are defined by visible minority status, linguistic contrasts, and different national origins as sampled in the 2013 Canadian General Social Survey. Multivariate statistical models control for other possible sources of variation in the experiences of individuals in order to identify how CI and CP vary in relation to ethnic identity itself. We consider relative positions of different ethnic groups in Canadian society using mean values of our measures, and different distributions of members of each group around such mean values using a new ratio of standard deviations of cultural involvement and cultural preference scores. These results give us new insights into comparative ethnic accommodation patterns, applicable in a wide range of other societal contexts beyond the Canadian data examined here.