Understanding Immigrants’ Experiences: Reflections on Ken Dion's Research Contributions

Abstract

This article focuses on Ken Dion's contributions to a central issue for understanding the psychology of immigration: namely, intergroup relations and immigrants’ experiences. Immigrants face many challenges, including the experience of prejudice and discrimination directed toward them by others already residing in the society to which they have immigrated. Ken's research focused on the perspective of those who are the targets of discrimination. After briefly describing his early seminal work on the social psychology of reported discrimination, his later contributions to this area are discussed, in particular, his involvement in interdisciplinary collaborative research pertaining to immigration which provided unique opportunities to further develop and test his ideas.