Acculturation

It’s been quite a while that I didn’t write for the blog. Since I’m really busy with my studies these weeks, I’ll write this blog about one of our courses and its content. The course is called acculturation which is a concept highly discussed in migration literature. It is defined as a process that entails contact between two cultural groups (an ethnic minority and ethnic majority group), resulting in numerous changes in both parties. Although, acculturation processes involve both the migrant and the dominant population, the changes are most consequential for the migrant group members. So in this course, we discuss the effects of acculturation and migration on migrants. Till now we especially focused on the migrant youth. We especially discussed the problematic outcomes of acculturation in children and young adolescents, such as mental health, problem behavior, substance use and youth delinquency. These subjects have been extensively studied in psychological research. This week we are given a research topic and we are supposed to develop a research design on this topic. The subject is on the role of hostile attribution and narcissism on aggressive behavior, which is evoked by actual and perceived ethnic discrimination. It focuses on the widely held assumption in social and behavioral sciences that one of the major determinants of aggression in ethnic minority is discrimination. The research project aims to investigate the extent to which ethnic discrimination leads to perceived discrimination and aggression in ethnic minority boys and whether the effect of ethnic discrimination is stronger for migrants with low levels of hostile attribution of intent and narcissistic personality. Given these research questions I’m working on a research design including the sample, data and methodology. I’m trying to come up with the best operationalization for this research topic. It’s really very interesting but quite challenging at the same time. So I should go back to work now. Best!