Poster #110 - Children’s expectations for dual national identities for immigrants

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Children expect immigrants to have both the ability and the desire to assimilate, and even prefer immigrants who assimilate compared to those who use other acculturation strategies (Dunlea et al., 2022; Verkuyten et al., 2014). However, immigrants themselves often maintain dual national identities, in which they identify with both their heritage and their host nations (Verkuyten et al., 2019). Thus, we investigate whether children understand that immigrants can maintain these multiple identities, or whether children expect people to hold a singular identity (of either their heritage or host country).

In the present study, we asked 4- to 11-year-olds (N = 215) to sort characters based on similarity. Specifically, participants were introduced to two novel countries (Cortania and Tamsena) and were told that people in each country played different novel games (e.g., Gorp and Quid) to establish cultural significance. Then, participants were asked to sort six characters into baskets that indicated whether those characters were similar to people from Cortania, Tamsena, both countries, or neither country (Figure 1). The characters that participants sorted were nonimmigrants (born and live in one country), immigrants (born in one country and moved to the other), and travelers (born in one country and visited the other).

As expected, children matched nonimmigrant characters to their heritage country, t(432) = 29.74, p < .001, indicating that they understood the task. Importantly, children matched immigrant characters to both countries, t(429) = 16.80, p < .001. Thus, children do endorse a dual national identity perspective for immigrants and expect that they will both maintain aspects of their heritage identity as well as acculturate in some ways to their host country. Children’s responses for the traveler were somewhat in the middle: they matched the traveler either with their heritage country, t(428) = 4.79, p < .001, or with both countries, t(428) = 8.40, p < .001. Importantly, children’s responses were significantly different when sorting the travelers than when sorting immigrant characters (Figure 2). Therefore, lower-level features of the task (e.g., seeing two flags) were not solely responsible for children’s tendency to match immigrant characters with both their heritage and host countries. Instead, children seem to understand that a lasting connection with a country, rather than simply an association with a country, impacts national identity. Similar patterns were found at all ages, but the differentiation between the character types strengthened with development.

Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of how children conceptualize national identity for immigrants. In particular, children are able to think of national identity as a flexible category and understand that immigrants can hold dual national identities. Future research should investigate children’s expectations for immigrants’ dual national identities at the intersection of other social identities, such as race, ethnicity, or language.

Authors

• Shreya Sodhi, University of California - Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author

• Zoe Liberman, University of California - Santa Barbara