Towards an Interactive Acculturation Model: A Social Psychological Approach

TLDR

Social psychological models of immigrant acculturation strategies highlight the need to clarify the interactive nature of immigrant–host community relations. The study proposes a continuum of ideological premises and an Interactive Acculturation Model to explain immigrant–host community relations and calls for empirical testing of the model. The authors develop a continuum of ideological premises and an Interactive Acculturation Model that links host and immigrant acculturation orientations, moderated by state integration policies, to predict relational outcomes. The model predicts which acculturation combinations are likely to yield consensual, problematic, or conflictual relational outcomes between immigrants and host community members.

Abstract

The first part of this paper proposes a continuum of ideological premises that seeks to account for the broad range of immigrant integration policies adopted by Western democratic states. In the second part, a review of Social Psychological models of immigrant acculturation strategies demonstrates the need to explain more clearly the interactive nature of immigrant and host community relations. The Interactive Acculturation Model (IAM) presented next proposes that relational outcomes are the product of the acculturation orientations of both the host majority and immigrant groups as influenced by state integration policies. The model makes predictions regarding the acculturation combinations most likely to produce consensual, problematic, and conflictual relational outcomes between immigrants and members of the host community. Social psychological research is needed to test the validity of the IAM model empirically.