Abstract
As a country of high migration, Sweden presents an interesting case for the study of belongingness. For the children of migrants, ethnic and national identification, as well as ascriptive identity, can pose challenges to feelings of belongingness, which is an essential element for positive mental health. In this article, survey data were collected from 626 Swedes whose parents were born in the following countries: Somalia, Poland, Vietnam, and Turkey. The results show that Poles significantly felt they received more reflective appraisals of ascription than any other group. However, despite not feeling as if they were being ascribed as Swedish, most group members (regardless of ethnic origin) had high feelings of belongingness to Sweden. Overall, individuals who felt that being Swedish was important for their identity indicated the highest feelings of belongingness. Further, individuals across groups showed a positive correlation between their national identification and ethnic identification, indicating a feeling of membership to both. These results mirror previous research in Sweden where individuals’ ethnic and national identities were positively correlated. The ability to inhabit multiple identities as a member of different groups is the choice of an individual within a pluralistic society. Multiple memberships between groups need not be contradictory but rather an expression of different spheres of inhabitance.
Highlights
In this study, descendants of migrants from different ethnic groups in Sweden were asked about their sense of belongingness and whether their feelings about their perceived identity, or the importance of their ethnic and Swedish identity influenced this
Sweden presents an interesting case to examine given its dark history of racial biology and current status as a leader in humanitarian migration
Belongingness had a small range of scores
Summary
Descendants of migrants from different ethnic groups in Sweden were asked about their sense of belongingness and whether their feelings about their perceived identity, or the importance of their ethnic and Swedish identity influenced this. Measurement in this way allows for the individuals to introspect how they fit into a broader supranational context rather than the ethnic national group (Simonsen 2016). Under the direction of Herman Lundborg, a known right-wing activist, until 1935, the institute focused on racial science and eugenics His successor, the anti-fascist Gunnar Dahlberg, helped shift the focus of the organization towards medical genetics. A number of different policies during the first half of the 1900s aimed to help maintain the purity of the Nordic or Swedish race This included the forced sterilizations of over 60,000 individuals from 1934 to 1975, most of whom were considered to be ‘lower stock’ such as the Roma or Travellers (Ericsson 2021; Hubinette and Lundström 2014). Practices such as these mirrored the desire for a homogenization of the population (ibid.)
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