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Walking hand-in-hand with two cultures : narrative accounts of long-term, bicultural Asian immigrant adults

University of British Columbia

Research literature on cultural adjustment has generally shown that immigrants who integrated both home and host cultures have the most favourable outcomes relative to those who have avoided interacting with either or both of the cultures. Yet, cultural integration may occur in many different ways, and the literature is scant in examining how individuals integrate the two cultures over time. This study focuses on long-term immigrants (five males and one female; total n=6) from East and Southeast Asian countries, who transitioned to Canada as adults and subsequently integrated their heritage and receiving culture over the course of 10 years or longer. The research question explored for this research was: how do long-term, bicultural immigrants narrate the process of integrating the two cultures (i.e., their culture of origin and the receiving culture)? This qualitative research aimed to address the gap in the literature using narrative inquiry and thematic content analysis to study how individuals personally made sense of living in and integrating the two cultures. The following five themes emerged: (a) building cultural knowledge, (b) distance from heritage culture and lifestyle, (c) incorporating multiple cultures into own world, (d) application of cultural competency, and (e) developing a personal balance of the cultures. The research results revealed the complexity of achieving and maintaining a balanced cultural integration, and seemed to suggest important directions for future cross-cultural research. Limitations of the current study as well as theoretical, clinical, and methodological implications were discussed.

Text

2015-08-11

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/54342

Counselling Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/