Ethnic Identity Processes Research Articles

The theoretical and methodological basis of the study of the processes of ethnic identification

The problem of ethnic identity of representatives of other nationalities, its formation depends on changes taking place in society, social and cultural life. Studying this issue is of great scientific importance in multiethnic Kazakhstan. This is because the ethnic minority, like all citizens in the society, goes through the necessary stages of adaptation in the socio-cultural environment. This will bring about changes in social relations. Its factors, socio-cultural features should be studied in order not to turn the changes into conflicts. Because the phenomenon of diaspora is based on ethnic identity, which ensures the survival of the ethnic organism. The theoretical basis of the article is the works of foreign and domestic scientists who have studied various aspects of ethnic identity. This is because the study of ethnic identity is a complex and multidisciplinary field that includes various theoretical and methodological approaches. Scholars from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and other disciplines have contributed to our understanding of how individuals and groups identify with their ethnic heritage. The article is based on a number of theoretical findings that seek to understand how the study of ethnic identity processes shapes the ethnic identities of individuals and groups. These theories provide insight into the complex interplay of factors that influence the development and maintenance of ethnic identity. The study used a historical method to understand how the functions of ethnic identity have changed from ancient times to the present day. The documentary method of analysis was used to analyze published scientific articles. Ethnic identity has been found to be a complex and multidimensional construct that can be influenced by personal experiences, societal norms, historical factors, and broader cultural dynamics.

Identity Selection and the Social Construction of Birthdays.

We argue that rather than being a wholly random event, birthdays are sometimes selected by parents. We further argue that such effects have changed over time and are the result of important psychological processes. Long ago, U.S. American parents greatly overclaimed holidays as their children's birthdays. These effects were larger for more important holidays, and they grew smaller as births moved to hospitals and became officially documented. These effects were exaggerated for ethnic groups that deeply valued specific holidays. Parents also overclaimed well-liked calendar days and avoided disliked calendar days as their children's birthdays. However, after birthday selection effects virtually disappeared in the 1950s and 1960s, they reappeared after the emergence of labor induction and planned cesarean birth. For example, there are many fewer modern U.S. births than would be expected on Christmas Day. In addition, modern parents appear to use birth medicalization to avoid undesirable birthdays (Friday the 13th). We argue that basking in reflect glory, ethnic identity processes, and superstitions such as magical thinking all play a role in birthday selection effects. Discussion focuses on the power of social identity in day-to-day judgment and decision-making.

Ethnic Socialization in Neighborhood Contexts: Implications for Ethnic Attitude and Identity Development Among Mexican-Origin Adolescents.

Neighborhood Latino ethnic concentration, above and beyond or in combination with mothers' and fathers' ethnic socialization, may have beneficial implications for minority adolescents' ethnic attitude and identity development. These hypotheses, along with two competing hypotheses, were tested prospectively (from x¯age=12.79-15.83years) in a sample of 733 Mexican-origin adolescents. Neighborhood ethnic concentration had beneficial implications for ethnic identity processes (i.e., ethnic exploration and perceived peer discrimination) but not for ethnic attitudes. For Mexico-born adolescents, high maternal ethnic socialization compensated for living in neighborhoods low on ethnic concentration. Findings are discussed vis-à-vis the ways in which they address major gaps in the neighborhood effects literature and the ethnic and racial identity development literature.

Ethnic Identity and Familism Among Latino College Students

The present study examined the longitudinal associations among familism respect and obligations values, ethnic centrality and private regard, and ethnic self-identification. Data were drawn from a socioeconomically diverse sample of Latino students attending a predominantly White university. The selection of a White label was associated with less positive private regard, less ethnic centrality, and less strong endorsement of familism respect and obligation values at the start of the academic year compared to those students who selected a national origin label. There was a complex relationship between ethnic identity and familism values over time. Ethnic centrality supported the growth in familism respect values across time, but familism respect values also predicted later growth in ethnic private regard. Our results highlight the fact that ethnic identity processes and familial cultural values can mutually influence each other in emerging adulthood for Latinos.

Participation in the Adoption Mentoring Partnership: Mentors' Experiences of Ethnic Identity.

The Adoption Mentoring Partnership (AMP) matches preadolescent adoptees with adopted college students, prioritizing matches of the same ethnic background. As part of AMP, participants actively discuss issues of ethnicity and adoption with a cohort of mentors over a period of 1 to 3 years in mentor group meetings (MGMs). This study focuses on mentors' perceptions of ethnic identity processes within the context of adoption during their participation in AMP. Thematic analysis is used to analyze two interviews from each of 12 internationally and transracially adopted mentors (8 females, 4 males; average age = 20.4 years; birth countries from Asia or Latin America). Four overarching domains emerged: personal ethnic identity exploration, communication with family members about adoption/ethnicity, social exchanges outside the family, and mentors' perceived personal meanings of ethnicity while participating in AMP. All mentors acknowledged degrees of ambivalence around ethnic identity, yet reported overwhelmingly positive feelings about participating in AMP.

“Somos Afro”: Champeta Music as a Means for Cultural/(Political) Organization for Afrodescendants in Colombia

“Somos Afro”: Champeta Music as a Means for Cultural/(Political) Organization for Afrodescendants in Colombia Ligia S. Aldana (bio) It can be affirmed categorically that no other people in the history of humankind have suffered a level of violence so devastating, massive, and for so many centuries, and that, nonetheless, responded with greater creativity to oppression. Their contribution to the arts, music, dance, song, theater, literature, sports and to the process of mestizaje in American and universal culture are of such magnitude that, each time, it surprises and disconcerts those who lately have taken up the task of quantifying their contribution. —Manuel Zapata Olivella, Las claves mágicas de América Latina 1 Introduction In the Colombian realm, culture is a vehicle of change that aims to hold the State accountable for the rights of Afro and indigenous peoples included in the new Colombian constitutional paradigm. In the Northern coast of Colombia, in particular, champeta music has shaped a powerful cultural/political movement that allows Afrodescendants of the region to assert a cultural identity in their own terms to make accessible new venues of economic survival through the subversion of official and exclusionary channels of artistic creation and through alternative modes of marketing and distributing music. Its very own background as a black Atlantic musical synchretic expression that combines Lumbalú, the funeral rhythms of El Palenque de San Basilio, with African souscous and other pan-Afro Caribbean accords, subverts officially backed musical trends that displace the Afro dimension of Colombia’s new multicultural and multilingual face. To better understand the impact and the changes effected by champeta in the Colombian Caribbean, it is necessary to examine the reality of Colombia in the 1990s regarding constitutional changes and the effects of neoliberalism. This can aid our understanding of why culture has become essential to new forms of resistance developed by Colombian Afrodescendants. [End Page 391] The Age of Renewed Violence(s): Colombia in the 1990s and the Cure of Cultural Constitucionalismo In the early 1990s, constitutional reform unfolded ethnic identity processes that continue to shape local activism among the large Afro populations of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Fascism and market fundamentalism took hold of the official political sphere simultaneously. These two puzzling and contrasting trends are direct results of the Washington Consensus, which pushed forth neoliberal ideologies that avow the cult of hypercapitalism and free market economies. In fact, Colombia is a perfect example of the implementation of the tenets of the Washington Consensus, and one that has been, nonetheless, mostly ignored beyond a handful of important studies on violence, democracy, and the causes of national fragmentation.2 Other widely circulated studies address the oversight of the outcome of the consensus in Colombia and offer historical and sociological analysis of the dire situation of its poor, a category that includes indigenous and Afro peoples, the elderly, women, children, and the disenfranchised urban and dislocated rural populations.3 The footnote to these publications seems to pose the same important questions: What is left to help build community when nothing works to empower citizens and collectivities to act upon their disadvantaged social standing? If neither mainstream political organization nor syndicalism, grassroot movements nor outright armed struggle can lead a subjugated majority to overturn a system, to improve their possibilities of survival, and to maintain the most basic tenets of human rights, what can bring people together to act on their situation and force the status quo to create a new national reality that offers Afrodescendants a rightful place? In spite of the chaos occurring in Colombia throughout the 1990s that the daily news duly highlighted, the centrality of Colombia in the saga of the Washington Consensus has been sorely overlooked (Massey et al. 15). When looking at the case of Colombia, the aftermath of the consensus becomes even clearer when examining it at the regional level, for it underlines how each segment of the population experiences social, political, and economic marginalization, circumstances upon which race and class bear definite weight. Countering Neoliberalism in the Colombian Caribbean In the Northern coast of Colombia, also known as the Colombian Caribbean, champeta music delineates popular culture as a site where the design of (cultural...

Mexican American High School Students’ Ethnic Self-Concepts and Identity

Mexican American high school students (N= 24) were administered semistructured interviews about their psychological experience of ethnicity. The interview focused on individual, friendship, peer group, and family domains. Qualitative analyses of the interview transcripts revealed six domains including ethnic identity, socialization, intraethnic support and challenge, interethnic relations and attitudes, ethnic transcendence, and ethnic differences and similarities. These six domains were graphically depicted that differentiated ethnic self-concepts from ethnic identity processes and identified the intraethnic and interethnic influences of the ethnic self-concepts and identity processes. There were three ethnic self-concepts (i.e., cultural self, possible minority self, and self that transcends ethnic group boundaries). These basic three ethnic self-concepts are consistent with other researchers’ identification of analogous ethnic self-concepts and socialization messages across a wide range of contexts. Implications for future empirical and theoretical research are discussed.

Narrative and ethnic identity exploration: A longitudinal account of emerging adults’ ethnicity-related experiences.

The purpose in this longitudinal study was to investigate further the link between ethnic identity processes and content through an examination of emerging adults' narratives of ethnicity-related experiences. Seventy ethnically diverse college students completed an ethnic identity exploration index and told an ethnicity-related narrative on 2 occasions 18 months apart. Results indicated that (a) participants who increased in exploration over time were more likely to change their narrative theme than participants who decreased or remained stable in exploration and (b) these changes were more likely to be to stories of experience of prejudice or connection to culture. This study highlights the costs and benefits of ethnic identity and provides evidence for a linkage between ethnic identity process and content in emerging adulthood.

A narrative approach to ethnic identity in emerging adulthood: Bringing life to the identity status model.

This study used a narrative approach to understand how emerging adults experience ethnicity in their everyday lives and to link ethnic identity processes with the content of how ethnic identity is experienced. Participants were 191 ethnically diverse emerging adults who completed the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) and provided a written narrative about a time at which they became aware of their ethnicity. Participants' narratives differed significantly by ethnic group and by ethnic identity status membership, as indexed by the MEIM. The results underscore the value of adopting a narrative approach to understanding the content of ethnic identity and the links between content and ethnic identity development processes.

Ethnic Identities and Indigenous Psychologies in Pluralist Societies

Current theorising about the sociopsychological processes of ethnic identity development and redefinition in pluralist societies is augmented by a framework of theoretical concepts, Identity Strudure Analysis, which places indigenous psychologies at its focus and indicates that conflicts within people's ethnic identities and between ethnic groups are generally to be expected. False expectations of engineering universal "harmony" represent an inadequate understanding of the sociopsychological development of ethnic identity in pluralist societies. Instead, potentials for resolutions of ethnic conflicts to tolerable levels need to be enhanced, while processes toward pathological ethnic conflict require to be contained. Consideration is given to fundamental conceptual issues in explicating ethnic identity processes in the socio-historical contexts of differing pluralist societies. Attention is directed to the necessity for the efficient operationalisation of identity con cepts, using, for example, the accessible Identity Exploration computer software, for rapid empirical investigations of the complexities of ethnic conflicts.

Ethnic Role Identity among Black and White College Students

This article examines a structural symbolic interactionist approach to the process of ethnic identity formation among black and white college students. This approach, termed identity theory, considers an ethnic identity (like all identities) to be a portion of the self that contains shared understandings of what it means to be a member of a given ethnic group. Within the framework of identity theory, ethnic identification is hypothesized to be related to self-esteem, identity salience, identity commitment, and other structural characteristics. Using the Burke-Tully method, a black-white ethnic identity dimension is developed and used to measure ethnic identity among a sample of college students. The nature of this identity dimension is discussed and its relation to the other self variables is investigated. The study confirmed that identity salience, commitment, and self-esteem, as hypothesized by identity theory, are related to ethnic identity among students. However, it was also noted that these ethnic identity processes seemed to work somewhat differently for blacks and for whites as a result of differences in dominant and minority position.