Beyond the four-fold model: Acculturation, identifications and cultural practices in British adolescents

This thesis reports research which examined acculturation in British adolescents by investigating their identifications and cultural practices. In particular, it aimed to draw attention to the limitations of the currently dominant model of acculturation, and to present an alternative approach for informing research into the acculturation of adolescents. Study 1 used qualitative interview techniques to investigate identities and cultural practices in British Indian and Pakistani adolescents aged between 13 and 16 years of age. The results revealed that Britishness was understood in a number of ways, including cultural behaviours, multiculturalism, types of attachments and trust in institutions. The interplay between their British, ethnic and religious identities, and their cultural practices across different contexts, revealed that the adolescents were immersed in global networks, peer culture and cultural practices which were not restricted to binaries of national or ethnic cultures only. The results also revealed that the adolescents were strategically essentialising their identities, by using some cultural practices to authenticate identities in one context, but other practices to authenticate different identities in another context. Study 2 used the results from the first study to develop a questionnaire which aimed to investigate some of these findings quantitatively. The questionnaire was administered to 377 school children aged between 11 and 18 years old. Statistical analyses confirmed the context-dependency of the identifications and cultural practices of the adolescents found in Study 1. There were a number of ethnic group and religious group differences; for example, non-white adolescents held more salient ethnic and religious identities than white adolescents. The investigation into cultural practices also revealed that there were cultural mixings, suggesting that some of the processes involved in acculturation were not confined to minority individuals only. A comparison between the present study and more orthodox studies of acculturation reveal that there is a need to redefine acculturation in a way which does not essentialise and categorise adolescents into rigid 'orientations', but allows for new and emergent identities to be investigated and understood, as these are more in line with the multicultural and global networks in which British adolescents live.