When Real Diverges from Ideal: How Person-Environment Fit Impacts Latina/o Immigrants' Acculturation and Psychosocial Wellbeing Across Four States

Abstract

Research indicates that immigrant wellbeing depends upon interactions between immigrants' characteristics and goals, and receiving communities' openness and acceptance (e.g., Phinney, Horenezyk, Liebkind, & Vedder, 2001). Still, most of the immigrant acculturation and wellbeing literature remains acontextual, thus limiting understanding of why some immigrants thrive while others struggle. To address these gaps, this study applied the Relative Acculturation Extended Model (RAEM; Navas et al., 2005) to characterize Latina/o immigrants' ideal and real acculturation across life domains in distinct regions of the United States. It then answered two questions unexplained by the model: (1) Why would ideal acculturation differ from real acculturation? and (2) What impact does the divergence of real acculturation from ideal acculturation have on wellbeing? To address these questions, the current study adopted a concurrent explanatory mixed-method approach (Creswell & Plano-Clark, 2007). Four hundred eighty Latina/o immigrants were recruited from two state pairs (i.e., Arizona and New Mexico, Maryland and Virginia), chosen for their demographic characteristics and immigration-related public policies, to participate in survey measures. A subset of participants (n = 73) participated in 12 focus groups. Quantitative data were primarily analyzed through ANOVA and path analyses and qualitative data were analyzed through constructivist grounded theory, informed by the constructs under study. Results indicated that participants wished to and did adopt more of their receiving communities' cultures in peripheral (e.g., work, economics, political systems, social welfare) and intermediate (e.g., social relationships, friendships) life domains than they did in central (e.g., family relationships, religious customs, ways of thinking, principles, values) life domains. Conversely, they wished to and did maintain their cultures in central life domains more than they did in other life domains. They had more difficulties changing and maintaining cultural customs in preferred ways in peripheral domains. Participants in Arizona, and to some degree, Virginia, were less able to make desired cultural changes than participants in Maryland and New Mexico. The proposed socio-ecological model of acculturation fit the data well, explaining why real acculturation may differ from ideal acculturation. A set of personal and contextual factors (i.e., ideal cultural change; quality of contact with, and acculturative preferences and prejudicial attitudes of the receiving community; perceived threat, and immigration-related public policies) predicted Latina/o immigrants' cultural changes, directly and/or indirectly through their sense of community with the receiving community and/or intergroup anxiety. A similar set of factors influenced Latina/o immigrants' cultural maintenance, directly and/or indirectly through their sense of community with the local Latina/o immigrant community. Qualitative data also indicated that personal characteristics, community resources, and information impacted the ways in which Latina/o immigrants changed and maintained their cultures. Finally, the better Latina/o immigrants were able to change and maintain their cultures in desired ways, the better their self-reported wellbeing, in part due to less acculturative stress with the receiving community. In sum, this study provides insight into reasons for the diverse array of Latina/o immigrant acculturation and wellbeing in the United States in light of their disparate contexts, preferences, and experiences.