Anna Miglietta

The Influence of Length of Stay, Linguistic Competence, and Media Exposure in Immigrants' Adaptation

Empirical evidence shows that immigrants adapt best in relation to their ability to negotiate between the cultural entities they confront. Factors such as cultural knowledge, length of stay in the new culture, and linguistic competence strongly influence this process. Length of stay and linguistic competence may be essential for cultural knowledge acquisition that, in turn, may be enhanced by mass media consumption. A questionnaire is completed by 576 immigrants (196 Romanians, 179 North Africans, and 201 Latino Americans) investigating time spent in Italy, proficiency in the Italian language, familiarity with Italian and homeland mass media, and acculturation. The authors hypothesize that language plays a central role in the acculturation process and assume that length of stay influences acculturation mostly through linguistic competence and mass media knowledge. A structural equation model is tested to verify the hypothesis. The model results are acceptable, invariant across genders, and partially invariant across ethno-cultural groups.

Family or friends: what counts more for drinking behaviour of young adults? / Familia o amigos: ¿qué pesa más en los hábitos de consumo de alcohol de los jóvenes?

Abstract The scientific literature stresses the importance of culture and social environment in determining what people think about alcohol consumption and consequently do. Several pieces of research have proved the influence on young adults’ alcohol use of proximal social contexts of their family and peers. The present study aimed at investigating the influence of family behaviours and norms compared to the peers’ influence in a context where the culture of alcohol is changing between the different generations. Data were collected by means of a self-report questionnaire on a sample of 598 young adults (average age 22.20 years). The variables investigated were socio-demographic characteristics, the alcohol consumption of parents and friends and the parents’ and peers’ approval of alcohol consumption. The results confirmed the role of family and friends in influencing young adults’ consumption of alcohol, stressing a difference between perceived behaviours and norms. The perceived consumption of parents and friends influenced the participants’ consumption. On the contrary, the effects of the approval of drinking were limited. Globally friends had a stronger influence on alcohol consumption in comparison with family.

Muslim Acculturation in a Catholic Country: Its Associations With Religious Identity, Beliefs, and Practices

The literature suggests that religion may play an important role in the acculturation process of immigrants by contributing to the maintenance of the heritage culture and preventing identification with the mainstream. With few exceptions, studies on this topic have focused on religion as a whole by assessing specific aspects or dimensions (such as religious identification, beliefs, and practices) and creating a composite measure without analyzing the contribution of each dimension to the acculturation process. In this study, the relationships between specific religious dimensions and acculturation were assessed with a sample of 282 Muslim immigrants who were recruited in the northern part of Italy. Two regression models show that religious identification drives the maintenance of Muslim culture but is unrelated to the acculturation to Italian culture, whereas beliefs and practices do not contribute to heritage acculturation but are negatively associated to acculturation to the host culture.

Acculturation in the discourse of immigrants and receiving community members: Results from a cross-national qualitative study.

This study explores the bidirectional and interactional process of acculturation from the perspectives of immigrants and receiving community members (RCMs). Our aim was to understand the experiences and interactions of different ethno-cultural groups and their impact on the functioning and dynamics of multicultural communities. We conducted a cross-national, cross-cultural study of acculturation processes, using interviews collected across two countries (Italy: urban regions of Torino and Lecce; U.S.: Baltimore/Washington corridor) and three distinct groups of immigrants—Moroccans and Albanians in Italy and Latin Americans in the United States—and RCMs in Italy and the United States. Findings show that acculturation is a complex, situated, and dynamic process, and is generally conceived as an unbalanced and individual process of accommodation, which expects the immigrant alone to adapt to the new context. The boundaries among traditionally explored acculturation strategies were blurred and while integration was the most frequently discussed strategy, it often referenced a “soft” assimilation, limited mostly to public domains. Some differences emerged between ethnic groups and generation of immigration as well as among RCMs who differed by level of contact with immigrants. The need for more flexible models and for a critical perspective on acculturation is discussed.

Personal values and the acceptance of immigrants: why national identification matters / Los valores personales y la aceptación de inmigrantes: ¿Por qué es importante la identificación nacional?

Abstract : The study focused on the relations between Italian nationals’ personal values and their expectations towards the way ethnic minorities should acculturate. The main aim was to understand whether nationals’ personal values predict their acculturation preferences towards immigrants, both directly and through national identity. Four hundred and forty-six Italian high school students (Mage = 19.1; SD = 0.57; females = 54.4%) completed a self-administered questionnaire assessing personal values, nationalism, patriotism, acculturation preferences and demographics. An SEM model with bootstrapping estimations was tested. As expected, the results highlighted that personal values predict acculturation preferences towards immigrants in two ways — directly and also through an indirect effect on nationalism — supporting the claim that ingroup and outgroup definitions are closely intertwined. The results also highlighted the need to differentiate between nationalism and patriotism, with the latter having no influence on Italian nationals’ readiness to accept immigrants. Overall, the research demonstrates the relevance of personal values in studying intergroup relations and draws attention to the potential value of communication policies centred on self-transcendence values to improve interethnic relations.

Gender, Sexism and the Social Representation of Stalking: What Makes the Difference?

Objective: The present study had 2 main aims: to investigate how ordinary people conceptualize stalking behaviors and to analyze whether respondents’ gender and attitudes toward women are related to the way the phenomenon is described and understood. The research was conducted from the perspective of social representation. Method: Three hundred fifteen university students from Torino who had never experienced stalking completed a questionnaire investigating their knowledge about the phenomenon and the levels of sexism. The participants also provided their free definition of stalking. Results: The results showed that the participants identify the causes of stalking in distorted outcomes of romantic relationships, view its aim as controlling the victims, and attribute psychological pain to victims. Women tended to identify stalking with ambiguous behaviors; hostile sexists tended to undervalue psychological consequences in victims. The representations of stalking showed an opposition between morbidity and aggression in the stalking definition, associated with the endorsement of sexist attitudes toward women. Specifically, benevolent sexism favored a conception of stalking as an annoying but not truly dangerous event. Conclusion: It would be useful to reconsider the contents of prevention initiatives: they have to be directed more toward acting on the symptoms and causes of stalking.

Beyond Prejudice: Extending the Social Psychology of Conflict, Inequality and Social Change

Since its foundation, the psychosocial perspective on prejudice has been mainly concerned with what we can find behind prejudice, i.e. the determinants of prejudicial attitudes in intergroup relations. John Dixon and Mark Levine invite us to go beyond prejudice looking through different lenses at ‘‘how social psychologists have framed the entire problem of investigating, understanding and changing intergroup relations’’ (p. 2). Their claim suggests that the real core of this book is to propose a critical look at the implications which the mainstream framing of the prejudice problematic has for models of social change. The proposed standpoint emphasizes the causal relationship between the conceptualization of a topic and its investigation. This only apparently obvious observation, forces the reader to reflect on the circularity of the relationship between theory and research practice, between political ideologies and the reality of intergroup relations. We can interpret the Biblical adage ‘‘seek and ye shall find’’ in the sense that those who seek only find what they are looking for, calling into question how the concept is assessed. Indeed, the methodology of data collection determines the very nature of the collected data that, in turn, will be read and understood in the light of the same theoretical assumptions guiding the research. For a social scientist, it is important to be aware of the implications of this roundabout, since the study of social phenomena often cannot avoid taking into account the dynamics of power acting in human societies. Since power dynamics are strictly connected to the political sphere, and since social scientists too are involved in such dynamics, this implies that political values are parts of social theories, and social scientists’ perspectives may find a correspondence in their political visions. Despite the plurality of voices, Behind Prejudice holds a clear and defined character. The main underlying argument is that the psycho-social mainstream approach to conflict and discrimination is based on specific, but in someway implicit assumptions that draw an image of the prejudiced person, the bigot, which is at the same time sophisticated and partial. It is sophisticated because researchers acknowledge that the bigot has a considerable complexity in terms of cognitive and emotional biases. It is partial because this image relies on a perspective that finds in the individual its reference point, and places the origin of negative beliefs within a lack of rationality by the prejudiced person. Coherently, the proposed solutions for reducing prejudiced attitudes and for reaching a greater social cohesion promote rehabilitative interventions aimed at the correction of individuals’ erroneous beliefs. From this standpoint, Behind Prejudice proposes a complete shift, rooting stereotypic beliefs in the dynamics of social identification and in the wider structure of social reality. Following a social categorization perspective, stereotypes are here considered flexible representations that hold a correspondence with the objective features of social contexts, and are instrumental in the construction of the vantage point from which majority group members look at social reality. The shift of analysis from individual to group-level even explains the ideological role of ambivalent prejudice in maintaining social inequalities. To maintain its privileges, the dominant group promotes a model of social harmony where intergroup inequalities are justified and legitimized, avoiding opportunities for subordinate members to embrace models of social change that could lead to a potential change in social power distribution. A blend of paternalistic and hostile emotions is instrumental for the reproduction of a system of hierarchical domination, since hostile attitudes cause the paternalistic forms to appear more widely acceptable and embraceable by subordinate group members. Paternalistic attitudes, indeed, are defined by positive Reviews 205