Psych thoughts: bicultural/dissociation

[azurelunatic]

I wonder if anyone's ever done a study on the incidence of dissociative coping mechanisms in people identifying as bicultural, especially when the two cultures in question are distinctly separated, say one culture in the home, and the other culture in the school or workplace.

I might be really interested in that study and the results.

Comments

[mnfiddledragon.livejournal.com]

what about situations where your "home culture" is distinctly Hispanic, (Spanish only spoken at home, etc), while school is distinctly not? There you *do* have wholly separate and significantly distinct cultures that a person has to deal with and cope with.

Actually I'm pretty sure we're going to be dealing with a bunch of it here in the Twin Cities fairly soon as we're getting an influx of about 5000 Hmong from Thailand. They're doing the best they can to ease culture shock and help people into the system - including setting up a temporary school just for the children to teach them English and keep them together so they're less isolated while they're getting used to being here. And from what I remember there's a fair bit of cultural tension in Hmong children who were either born in Laos or Thailand, but raised here with Hmong parents in an American environment (read LOTS of cultural tension - particularly among girls), or amongst 1st or 2nd generation American born Hmong.

It's something fairly common in immigrant families, but certain cultures see it more prevalent - the Hmong and Hispanic (believe it or not, the Irish as well in the 19th century) being a few examples.

azurelunatic, I'm pretty sure that there have been such studies - I forget the name of the index, but there's a social science index that universities tend to have copies of. Otherwise, I would be surprised if a study like this was not published in American Anthropologist.

[thette.livejournal.com]

Scopus have social science as well. One of the journals they're searching is American Anthropologist.

[mnfiddledragon.livejournal.com]

sweet!

[azurelunatic]

That was the exact situation I was thinking of as an example, given that I live in Arizona. There are Hispanic households & communities, and (depending on the demographics of the entire area) mainstream US culture school/work.

[mnfiddledragon.livejournal.com]

*nod* well - I'm not sure about any psychological studies, but I *know* there are anthropological studies, I just can't remember any off the top of my head. You could also look up old ethnographic studies on immigrant populations in the US - I'd look up Irish ones if you can't find any Hispanic ones - there may even be Hmong - and possibly Somali - those IIRC are in my opinion hot spot type cultures where you're more likely to see some interesting things going on because the parents are less likely to want to break away from their primary culture.

There are some other interesting things done with children of immigrants on down to 3rd and 4th generation.

[azurelunatic]

I was thinking, specifically: my own dissociative identity condition was caused by the difference in home vs. school, and the fact that I was addressed by different names at home and at school. Home and school were really not all that different, both being different flavors of US culture. I'm wondering if my experience is really all that uncommon, in dissociating to deal with the culture shock. It's dissociated identities to function in the different environments, rather than dissociated identities as the result of abuse, which is the sort that gets most of the attention.

I feel, paradoxically, very lonely, though I suspect that there are any number of people in a similar mental situation.