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Description
Individuals create meaningful systems that are driven by culturally learned ideas, values, beliefs, and knowledge. Although each culture provides the same knowledge base for its group members to draw upon, the actual content used to represent a culture may vary across individuals. Therefore, even members of the same culture may display great variability in the content that makes up their personal cultural meaning systems. Individual differences in experiences and socialization are reflected in the extent to which multiculturals identify with the various cultures that they associate with. While multicultural identity is a general term that applies to individuals who identify with two or more cultures, the term bicultural identity is used to characterize individuals who identify primarily with two cultures. The present research focused on bicultural individuals and examined the strength of their identification with the two cultures that they feel most closely connected to. An important specificity of our approach was to investigate processes and components of bicultural identities operating outside of conscious control or awareness. Our assumption is that individuals are not always able to control or are aware of the extent to which they identify with different cultures. We looked at the strength of identification with each culture independently, as well as the relative strength of identification between the two cultures. Participants consisted of 138 students from the SDSU main campus who self-identified as being bicultural. To measure the strength of the identification with each of the two cultures separately, we used the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT). We also measured the strength of the identification with both cultures relative to one another by using a traditional Implicit Association Test (IAT). Generally, researchers predetermine the stimuli used for the implicit measures. In the present study, we had participants generate their own stimuli to be used in the tasks, which tapped into the individuals' idiosyncratic cultural meaning systems and made the procedure more meaningful and relevant to them. In addition, we assessed identification with the two relevant cultures in a more classical way. Participants were asked to reflect consciously on their identification with these cultures (self-report measures). We found that participants were able to easily list the two cultures that they most associated with, as well as items to represent those cultures. We used the stimuli generated by the participants to measure cultural identification and found that implicitly participants identified with culture A but not with culture B, while explicitly they identified with both cultures A and B. Additionally, when these two cultures were contrasted against each other, there was a stronger identification with culture A than with culture B at both implicit and explicit levels of responding. In sum, the study contributes to the development of a personalized and flexible approach to better understand the nature of bicultural identifications by examining the cultures that are most meaningful and relevant to bicultural individuals, the distinct terms that defines these cultures, as well as measuring the strength of implicit and explicit cultural identifications towards the two cultures.
