Poster #66 - “What’d you say to me?”: How Multicultural Identification Relates to Resilience and Responses to Microaggressions

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Asian Americans face a predicament because they receive seemingly contradictory cultural influences (i.e., collectivist Asian vs. individualist American) and are subjected to racial microaggressions (i.e., casual, everyday racism; Sue et al., 2007). However, because of the stereotype that they excel despite being minorities, their negative experiences are often neglected or invalidated. Being subjected to racial microaggression can be taxing for individuals’ psychological wellbeing (Sue et al., 2007), but having an adaptive sense of identity may serve important protective functions (e.g., see Yampolsky et al., 2015). Yampolsky and colleagues (2015) described three possible orientations to multicultural identity: (1) categorization is choosing one culture, typically the dominant culture; (2) compartmentalization is alternating between cultural influences based on social context; and (3) integration is harmoniously blending cultural influences within oneself. They found that general psychological wellbeing was associated negatively with compartmentalization and positively with integration, while the results were inclusive for categorization. Extending from this research, the current study asked if multicultural identity orientations may be associated with resilience and reactions to racial microaggression.

Asian American college students (N = 245, mean age = 18.75) completed the Multicultural Identity Integration Scale (MULTIIS; Yampolsky et al., 2015) and the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS; Smith et al., 2008). Afterwards, participants responded to (A) an ambiguous microaggression scenario (being asked “Where are you REALLY from?” to evoke the perpetual foreigner bias identified by Sue et al., 2007) and (B) a randomly assigned positive or the negative microaggression scenario (both involving oversimplifying their culture: “I love spicy food! Isn’t your culture's food all spicy?” for the positive scenario and “I think we should lean on my culture’s food for spices because I don’t want it to smell bad” for the negative scenario). Participants’ written responses to the inherent social conflict were coded as submitting (e.g., “ok, I guess”), confronting (e.g., “that’s racist”), or educating (e.g., “my ethnicity is… but I was born here”).

Results showed that compartmentalization and categorization were associated with lower resilience (compartmentalization: r = -.17, p < .01; categorization: r = -.13., p < .05), as well as higher confrontation (r > .13, ps < .05) in the ambiguous scenario. Thus, having unintegrated multicultural identities was linked to reduced ability to bounce back from difficulty and increased sensitivity to potential attack. Meanwhile, although integration was unrelated to resilience (r = -.03, p = .66), it was positively related to educating in both the positive and negative scenarios (rs = .20, ps < .05). This finding suggested that a harmonious approach internally to one’s cultural identities was accompanied by a constructive approach outwardly to social conflicts regarding culture. The current findings revealed important ties between multicultural identity, resilience, and responses to racial tension, specifically how certain identification orientations may be beneficial or detrimental to the self and to intergroup relations.

Authors

• Sovannie Len, University of California - Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author

• Shinchieh Duh, San José State University