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Article Excerpt
Abstract
In 2001, the Chinese were the largest visible minority group in Canada, with over one million individuals identifying themselves as Chinese. There is a growing concern about the extent to which the Chinese and other minority members can adjust to and become assimilated into the majority society. However, there is currently no instrument available that can be used to measure the acculturation levels of Chinese residing in Canada. This paper develops an acculturation measure specifically designed for Chinese in Canada. The measure consists of seven dimensions: social interactions, language preference, self-construal, ethnic identity, gift giving and holiday celebration, food and community preference, and filial piety. The measure demonstrates content, discriminant, and predictive validity, as well as high overall reliability. Research limitations and future research needs are also discussed.
Resume
En 2001, les Chinois formaient la minorite visible la plus importante au Canada avec plus d'un million de personnes s'identifiant comme telles. La question se pose de plus en plus quant a savoir jusqu'ou les Chinois et d'autres membres de groupes minoritaires peuvent s'ajuster et s'assimiler la societe majoritaire. Cependant, il n'existe pour le moment aucun instrument utilisable pour mesurer les niveaux d'acculturation des Chinois residant au Canada. Cet article en presente un specifiquement concu pour ces derniers. II porte sur sept aspects a evaluer: interactions sociales, preference langagiere, perception de sol, identite ethnique, presentation de cadeaux et celebration de fetes, nourriture et preference communautaire, ainsi que piete filiale. Cette approche fournit des donnees mesurables quant au contenu, a leur fonction discriminante, et a leur validite predictive ainsi qu'un haut degre de fiabilite. Mais il ne faut pas ignorer les limitations de cette recherche, ni les besoin d'une autre a venir.
INTRODUCTION
Canada has experienced a continuing decline in the number of people identifying themselves as being of British or French origin (Boyd and Vickers 2000; Renaud and Badets 1995). In contrast, the number of Asian immigrants began to increase during the 1980s and increased substantially from 1991 onwards (Statistics Canada 2003a). For instance, of the 1.8 million immigrants who arrived between 1991 and 2001, 58% came from Asia (ibid.). By 1996, Chinese immigrants became the largest visible minority not only among Asian groups, but also among all other immigrant groups in Canada (Chard and Renaud 1999). This situation has continued. In 2001, Chinese account for the largest visible minority group with a total of 1,029,395 individuals identifying themselves as Chinese. These numbers represent 3.5% of the total national population and 26% of the visible minority population (Statistics Canada 2003a). The People's Republic of China (mainland China) was the leading country of birth among individuals who immigrated to Canada in the 1990s (ibid.). By May 2001, 332,825 Chinese living in Canada were born in mainland China (Statistics Canada 2003b).
Historically, Chinese were not accepted in Canada, and, from 1885 to 1962, were "subjected to more racist laws than any other group in Canadian history" (Law Union of Ontario 1981, 22, quoted in Taylor 1991). The first group of Chinese immigrants arrived in British Columbia in the 1850s and worked in the gold fields. When the fields became depleted, most worked as labourers building the western portion of the Canadian Pacific railroad (Haggart 2001). On the completion of the railway, the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act was passed to discourage the entry of Chinese immigrants by introducing a "head tax" of $50 per person. This tax increased to $500 in 1906 (Taylor 1991). The majority of Chinese immigrants were men. This situation did not change until the 1950s when most men were allowed to reunite with their wives and children. The point system was introduced for selecting emigrants to Canada in 1967, and this system also applied to Chinese applicants. In the 1970s and 1980s, most Chinese emigrants were wealthy entrepreneurs from Honk Kong and Taiwan, accounting for fully half of all business-category immigrants in 1990 (Haggart 2001). In 1989, a large number of students and scholars also became permanent residents of Canada, owing to the humanitarian policy implemented by the Canadian government in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident (Liu 1998). Since 1997, emigrants from Hong Kong have decreased in number. During the same period, the number of emigrants from mainland China increased, and they were the largest proportion of the immigrant population from 1998 through 2000 (Edmonton Chinese News 2001).
Most Chinese live in a few major metropolitan areas, with Vancouver having the largest proportion of Chinese immigrants (40%), followed by Toronto (33%), Montreal (5%), Calgary (5%), and Edmonton (4%, Chiu et al. 2005). In these cities, they resided in well-established Chinese communities (Bauder and Sharpe 2002). "Chinatowns" are the spatial concentration of commercial activities and residential locations for the Chinese. The existence of Chinatowns worldwide is the result of racial ideology translated into institutional practices and physical place, and often a reflection of official and informal policies of segregation (Hou and Garnett 2003; Saito 2003).
An old Chinese proverb states that "one who stays near vermilion gets stained red, and one who stays near ink gets stained black." Upon contact with a new culture, an individual may change in a number of ways. Berry (1980), for example, proposed that this process of change involves six psychological areas: use of language, personality, identity factors, attitudes, learning styles, and levels of stress. During this process of cultural interaction, a newcomer becomes acculturated or assimilated into the major society. Measurement of this process is critical; however, a measure of acculturation has yet to be developed specifically for Chinese in Canada.
Finally, it is important to remember that ethnic groups are not homogeneous (Li 1998) and that they invariably demonstrate intra-group differences. For example, Chinese from mainland China retain more of their traditional Chinese culture than the Chinese from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, the latter three being more democratic and westernized than the first (Yu and Berryman 1996). Thus, Chinese immigrants from different countries or regions should, ideally, be studied separately. In view of this, and taking into consideration that the majority of Chinese emigrants to Canada during the past ten years were from mainland China, the purpose of this paper is to develop an instrument that can measure the extent to which mainland Chinese in Canada have become acculturated.
ACCULTURATION
The classic definition of acculturation was proposed by Redfield et al. (1936, 149): "acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups." Acculturation involves the learning and adoption of the values and norms of the adopted society. Although acculturation will inevitably be experienced by all newcomers with the same cultural and ethnic backgrounds, the outcomes may vary. Berry (1980) proposed four basic strategies of acculturation: integration, assimilation, separation/segregation, and marginalization. Other studies have found that most immigrants can be classified as integrated and separated (see Goldmann 1998; Korzenny 1999), suggesting that "many immigrants actually desire to maintain a substantial part of their cultural heritage and identity in the society of settlement" (Berry and Sam 1997, 305). This appears to be the case for Chinese in Canada, as Goldmann found that 74% of Chinese reporting a single ethnic origin were integrated, while 17.1% were separated/segregated, and only 8.4% were assimilated (1998, 138).
The above findings suggest that most immigrants are characterized by selective acculturation or functional acculturation, which "does not necessarily require individuals to disclaim their cultural values or disown their ethnic identities" (Duan and Vu 2000, 226). In North America, according to Husbands and Idahosa (1995), it is very rare for a visible minority to be totally absorbed into the mainstream society, although it is generally accepted that assimilation may occur among those who are second generation or at least "1.5 generation" (Rumbaut 1994). The Chinese appear to have much stronger ethnic retention. Kriger and Kroes (1962) argued that even the second-generation Chinese Americans would very likely retain much of their cultural heritage (1962, quoted in Mah 1995). This argument has been empirically supported. For instance, Rosenthal and Feldman (1992) found that second-generation Chinese Americans, as well as Chinese Australians, still consider maintaining Chinese cultural practices important, despite their apparent shift of Chinese cultural norms in behaviour and knowledge. Moreover, they also found few differences in the measure of cultural values with respect to individualism versus collectivism. Yang (1986) concluded, after comparing the motives of native Chinese and overseas Chinese using the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (Edwards 1959), that "we must say that this 'experiment' [as aforementioned] over many generations has been unable to change the overall need pattern of the Chinese 'subjects'" (110-11). There could be two explanations for Yang's finding: first, that traditional Chinese culture is deeply rooted in its members' personality and way of life (Mah 1995), and, second, that the cultural distance between China and North America is very large. Finally, studies in other areas also support this pattern of acculturation of Chinese groups (e.g., leisure, meaning, and participation, Allison and Geiger 1993; child rearing and education, Mah 1995).
MEASUREMENT OF ACCULTURATION
When ethnic values, attitudes, and behaviours are compared with those of the majority group, it is essential that the concept of acculturation be measured also. Therefore, a tailor-made measure that can properly reflect the type, dimension, and process of acculturation, as well as the profound cultural traits of both the "mainstream" culture and the culture in question, is critical. Otherwise, any explanation of findings involving the measure may incorrectly incorporate "common-sense meanings, which are embedded in implicit assumptions about cultural and ethnic difference" (Hunt 1999, par. 1). In view of this, the following section will (a) examine the characteristics of acculturation, (b) review the major acculturation measurement scales generally and those dealing with the Chinese specifically, and, (c) based on the above, propose an acculturation instrument specifically designed for Chinese individuals.
Characteristics of Acculturation
Acculturation has been widely recognized as a process in which an individual, owing to immediate contact with an adopted society, undergoes the loss of his or her original cultural traits and values while gaining those of the host culture. Although acculturation and assimilation are often used interchangeably in the literature, acculturation is conceptually different from assimilation in that assimilation is either just the "terminal stop" in the process of acculturation (Suinn et al. 1992) or a sort of "perfect" form of acculturation (Pires and Stanton 2000). Indeed, most of the acculturation scales that utilize multiple indices measure not only acculturation (based, for example, on language use and food consumption), but also assimilation traits (such as cultural orientation and ethnic identity). In general, however, acculturation is described in terms of two separate domains: the acculturation process and acculturation dimensions.
Acculturation Process
Traditionally, the process of acculturation has been viewed as being linear, unidimensional, and unidirectional, with the individual eventually and inevitably being assimilated into the mainstream society. Today, the process of acculturation is generally viewed as being bidirectional, multidimensional, and dynamic, such that an individual may either maintain his or her cultural traits and values, or become assimilated into the mainstream society.
Acculturation is a multidimensional process in that an individual may experience different aspects of acculturation. For instance, Gordon (1964) identified seven progressive dimensions of the acculturation/assimilation process: (a) cultural assimilation (acculturation), (b) structural assimilation, (c) marital assimilation, (d) identificational assimilation, (e) attitude receptional assimilation, (f) behaviour receptional assimilation, and (g) civic assimilation. This pattern of acculturation indicates that acculturation is a progressive process in which an individual begins with cultural acculturation and ends with complete assimilation, the latter characterized by the "absence of value and power conflict" with the host society (Hazuda et al. 1988, 690). It should also be noted that the arrival at the final stop--civic assimilation--does not necessarily mean the complete, or even partial, loss of one's original cultural traits, such as language and food preferences. Rather, Orozco et al. (1993, 150) stress that...
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