Parental Cultural Conflict and Children's Cultural Identity Development

Authors

Amanda Araki, Dominican University of CaliforniaFollow

Files

Abstract

Parent culturally incompatibility was evaluated for its possible negative impact on a bicultural offspring’s cultural identity development. The 43 self-identified bicultural participants, aged from 18 to 67 years, provided family cultural histories, and completed the Parental Cultural Conflict Scale (PCCS) and the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM). The hypothesized relationship between high PCCS levels and low MEIM levels was not supported by the data; however, the range of responses on the PCCS was very limited with a complete absence of any very low or very high conflict scores. It was concluded that parents’ cultural incompatibility does not have the level of negative impact on their offspring’s cultural identity development as originally anticipated, but due to the limited range of PCCS values, the hypothesis cannot be completely rejected. Results also demonstrated that there was also no significant difference found in the mean MEIM scores for the bicultural study sample and published norms for various monocultural groups, suggesting that bicultural children may find their path to self-identification that is neither enhanced nor impaired by having two parents of different cultures.

Department

Psychology

Faculty Advisor

Ian Madfes, Ph.D.

Publication Date

Spring 2017

Sponsorship/Conference/Institution

Scholarly & Creative Works Conference, Dominican University of California

City

San Rafael, CA

Keywords

Bicultural, Cultural Identity Development, Parental Cultural Conflict, Psychology

Disciplines

Child Psychology | Clinical Psychology | Counseling | Counseling Psychology | Developmental Psychology | International and Area Studies | Multicultural Psychology | Other Social and Behavioral Sciences | Psychology | Social Psychology