Heritage Acculturation Is Associated With Contextual Factors at Four Different Levels of Proximity

Abstract

What factors explain the extent to which members of cultural minorities maintain their heritage cultural engagement? Although this process, called heritage acculturation, has significant implications for adjustment, we know little about its antecedents. The present work sought to address two shortcomings of acculturation research: (a) the need to characterize antecedents of acculturation orientations and (b) the need to consider acculturation as a contextual phenomenon. Some studies have documented associations between acculturation and specific contextual variables (e.g., family socialization), but an important feature of this research was to examine the unique contribution of factors at multiple levels of proximity simultaneously. Specifically, this study considered intraindividual, home, social network, and neighborhood-level contextual correlates of heritage acculturation. The overarching hypothesis tested among multicultural university students in Canada (n = 271) was that people whose life contexts are more strongly imbued with heritage cultural influences would report greater heritage acculturation. Results fully supported this hypothesis. Greater heritage language competence, “parental” living arrangements, a more extensive heritage social network, and living in an ethnically denser neighborhood were all related to greater heritage cultural maintenance. Further, only heritage network extensiveness was negatively related to mainstream cultural engagement—attesting to the cultural specificity of these associations. These results suggest that none of the four contextual levels considered here was sufficient on its own to understand participants’ heritage acculturation and that we need a holistic view of the person in her or his multiple contexts when studying acculturation.