Acculturation Measures

In light of the growing number of people of color represented in the 2000 U.S. Census, research in psychology is working to expand the field's understanding of the needs of ethnically and culturally diverse populations. Besides documenting differences in how people from diverse ethnic groups think, act, and believe, the most progressive research seeks not only to determine where important distinctions lie but also to demonstrate the meaning of group differences. Researchers have argued that the most meaningful difference, both between and within ethnic groups, is the value that an individual places on his or her culture. Recently, the measurement of that value has come in the form of acculturation measures. Designed to identify attachment to one's culture of origin, to a new culture, or to both, acculturation measures can be invaluable tools for understanding group differences.

The need for acculturation measures was created in part by the problems researchers had interpreting findings when people of color were included in study [Page 8]samples. When people of color were combined into one group (i.e., people of color versus Caucasian subsamples), researchers struggled to determine what role, if any, cultural differences played in the results. Furthermore, when people of color were separated into different groups according to ethnic identification, researchers also had difficulty determining the role of culture within and between groups. That is, it was and is unclear what role culture plays in research findings because researchers did not have a method for controlling or testing the level of “culturalness” present in a given sample of people of color. Within ethnic-group differences are often larger than between-group differences, and researchers needed a way to ensure that when sampling people of color from one ethnic group, the group represented a homogeneous representation of a specific level of cultural attachment. Acculturation measures were thought to be one step toward untangling the effects of culture by creating a method for assessing levels of cultural attachment, especially within ethnic groups.

Early models for acculturation measures suggested that acculturation was best conceptualized on a single continuum. Advocates of this perspective believed that acculturation is a process of moving from one's culture of origin to the other end of the spectrum, whereby a person becomes a member of a new or host culture. Some measures of acculturation in this system indicated only high or low involvement in one's host culture (unicultural), and some represented a true continuum from attachment to the culture of origin to the dominant culture (dual cultural). A central tenet of these approaches was that individuals cannot be equally immersed in two cultures at one time and likely have to give up some aspect of one culture to be a part of a different culture. Examples of measures from this approach include the African American Acculturation Scale, the Asian Values Scale, and the Acculturation Measure for Chicano Adolescents.

During the 1980s, several researchers began developing an extension to the previous notion that acculturation was best represented by a linear progression and instead suggested that a unicultural or dual-cultural perspective ignored individuals who were bicultural. Biculturalism, in this sense, represents individuals who maintain adherence to more than one culture at a time. Researchers proposed that acculturation is a bilinear process with one continuum representing a process whereby individuals can experience either marginality (adherence to no culture) or involvement and either uniculturalism or biculturalism. Examples of measures representing this approach include the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans and the Biculturalism Involvement Questionnaire.

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