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Acculturation and Psychological Adjustment of Vietnamese Refugees: An Ecological Acculturation Framework

  • Original Article
  • Published:
American Journal of Community Psychology

Abstract

Acculturation to the culture of the host society as well as to one’s heritage culture have been shown to impact immigrants’ adjustment during the years following resettlement. While acculturation has been identified as an important factor in adjustment of Vietnamese immigrants (Birman and Tran in Am J Orthopsychiatr 78(1):109–120. doi:10.1037/0002-9432.78.1.109, 2008), no clear pattern of findings has emerged and too few studies have employed an ecological approach. The purpose of this paper is to contextualize the study of acculturation and adjustment by taking an ecological approach to exploring these relationships across several life domains, using a bilinear scale, and examining mediators of these relationships for adult Vietnamese refugees (N = 203) in the United States. We call this approach the Ecological Acculturation Framework (EAF). Results of a structural equation model (SEM) showed that job satisfaction fully mediated the relationship between American acculturation and psychological distress, demonstrating that this relationship was specific to an occupational domain. However, while Vietnamese acculturation predicted co-ethnic social support satisfaction, it did not predict reduced psychological distress. Implications for a life domains approach, including domain specificity, are discussed.

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Notes

  1. For an extensive discussion of acculturation measurement and bilinear approaches, please see Birman and Simon (2014).

  2. There is also theoretical support for models in which unemployment is a risk factor for poor mental health as opposed to the opposite “selection” model in which poor mental health leads to unemployment (Dohrenwend 1978). Further empirical support for the unemployment causation model is that lower occupational status has been shown to lead to poor regulation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis (Rosmond and Bjorntorp 2000), which is a physiological measure of stress.

  3. Some (n = 25 out of 203) reported that they were not employed and of them, some (n = 11 out of 25) still completed the job satisfaction questionnaire. Further, a small number of participants (n = 7 out of 25) did not report whether they were working but two of them completed the job satisfaction questionnaire. The data from these 18 participants who completed the job satisfaction questionnaire were included because they may have not wanted to disclose their job because they were working in the informal economy or did not have a job title to report (e.g., homemakers), but still had a subjective opinion of how satisfied they were with life in their occupational domain which they wanted to share. Full Information Maximum-Likelihood (FIML) was used to handle the missing data from those who did not complete the job satisfaction measure but did complete the other measures.

  4. Job satisfaction was missing data at random (Little’s MCAR: χ2,19 = 21.44, ns; MNAR with HSCL-25: t(8.7) = −1.40, ns) on 9.8 % of cases according to the Missing Value Analysis function within SPSS version 20. Remaining variables were missing 5 % or less of data. Therefore, for hypothesis testing, FIML was used to handle missing data (Enders 2006). The distributions of all variables, except job satisfaction [W(175) = 0.99, ns], were non-normal according to the Shapiro–Wilk test (1965). However, transforming these non-normal variables was not necessary since the bootstrapping method used to test mediation corrects for non-normality by creating a normal distribution of k samples (Preacher and Hayes 2008).

  5. Prior to being used in the SEM, the measurement model assessed the degree to which two indicators of CESS satisfaction loaded onto this hypothesized latent construct. The standardized factor loadings for CESS satisfaction from live-in family members and from Vietnamese friends were 0.69 and 0.74 respectively, with both indicators fixed to 1 because the model was under-identified when only one indicator was fixed. This measurement model was just-identified (df = 0). However, since CESS satisfaction is correlated with at least one other variable in the SEM (i.e., Vietnamese acculturation), it was reasonable to proceed with analyses (Kline, 2011). The fit indices for this measurement model indicated a poor (χ2(0, N = 201) = 0.00, p = 0.00) to good (RMSEA = 0.00, 0.0-0.00, p = 0.00; SRMR = 0.00; CFI = 1.00; TLI = 1.00) fit. Therefore, the CESS satisfaction factor can be used in the SEM estimated below.

  6. Psychological distress was also tested as a mediator to rule out the alternative “selection model” hypothesis. This alternate hypothesis was not supported in this sample; psychological distress did not mediate American nor Vietnamese acculturation and job satisfaction.

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Acknowledgments

The research described in this article was conducted as part of Corrina D. (Simon) Salo’s master’s thesis at the University of Illinois at Chicago, supervised by Dina Birman. We thank Edison Trickett and Robin Mermelstein for serving on Corrina’s thesis committee. In addition, we thank Shanika Blanton, Bonnie Solomon, Emily Bray, Wing Yi Chan, Meredith Wellman, and Alex Sokolovsky for their helpful comments on drafts of this manuscript and/or analyses.

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Salo, C.D., Birman, D. Acculturation and Psychological Adjustment of Vietnamese Refugees: An Ecological Acculturation Framework. Am J Community Psychol 56, 395–407 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-015-9760-9

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