How Parenting Facilitates Adolescents’ Tricultural Identity Development: A Mixed Methods Collective Case Study of Tridimensionally Acculturating Black Jamaican Immigrant Families

Abstract

This article presents a mixed methods collective case study of the role of maternal socialization in shaping the tricultural identity development of Jamaican immigrant adolescents in the United States, who are known to acculturate tridimensionally. Seven Black adolescents (14–18 years; four male) completed online surveys and their Jamaican-born mothers completed online interviews during the dual COVID-19 and Whiteness pandemics. In-depth mixed methods case analyses and cross-case comparisons revealed both particulars and universals. Across all cases, adolescents had strong Jamaican private identities shaped by steady proximal and remote enculturation into Jamaican culture, and mothers’ skillful authoritative parenting supported their autonomy in acquiring and navigating U.S. cultural affiliations. Case particulars grouped adolescents into four profiles with one case fitting two profiles. 1) “Triculturals” had strong Jamaican or multicultural socialization with positive psychological and academic adaptation, but differing multicultural identity conflict. 2) “Reluctant Majority Culture Assimilators” had high achievement but differing psychological adaptation with mothers whose socialization first involved accepting their teens’ African American identities. 3) “Majority Culture Rejectors” had high belonging and no psychological distress but low average grades with maternal socialization that promoted the American Dream master narrative and resisted the alternative narrative of negative linked fate of ethnic minorities. 4) Finally, “Minority Culture Assimilators” had low multicultural identity conflict but differing psychological and academic adaptation and were being socialized by their mothers to resist being either victim or perpetrator of racial discrimination by harnessing cultural variability to play up and play down cultural identities and by avoiding use of ethnic-racial generalizations.