Internal and External Ethnic Identity and Their Correlates: A Study of Chinese American Immigrants

✍ Scribed by Kwong-Liem Karl Kwan; Gargi Roysircar Sodowsky

• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 861 KB
• Volume: 25
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0883-8534
• DOI: 10.1002/j.2161-1912.1997.tb00315.x

✦ Synopsis

The measurement of internal ethnic identity and external ethnic identity showed that Chinese American immigrants could be differentiated into different identity groups. Additionally, internal ethnic identity significantly predicted salience of ethnicity and loss of face. Income, ethnicity salience, external ethnic identity, and loss of face were significant predictors of acculturative stress.

Members of a racial or ethnic minority group share an ethnic social and cultural heritage, such as language, family structure, religion, ethnic signs, symbols and artifacts, value orientations, and gender roles (Sodowsky & Carey, 1987; Sodowsky, Lai, & Plake, 1991) that is passed on between generations, albeit with modifications influenced by intergenerational acculturation. Furthermore, the shared ethnic heritage includes individual members' sense of attachment to or identification with the ethnocultural group. In fact, central to ethnic identity is this 'subjective symbolic or emblematic use of any aspect of culture" (DeVos & Romanucci-Ross. 1975, p. 16). According to Smith (1991).

the ethnocultural group is a reference group whose members, through the process of interacting with each other and establishing boundaries with others, identify themselves as being a member of that group. Ethnic iden-