Abstract
Australia is a nation of immigrants and acculturation stress is known to impact immigrants’ ability to adapt to life in their new country. Consequences of unmanaged acculturation stress include depression, anxiety, physical illness and even radicalisation and suicide. This essay looks at the concepts of acculturation, cultural dimensions, and culture distance and explores how they can inform understanding of the acculturation process, and the source and management of acculturation stress in Australian immigrants. It draws attention to limitations of the dominant measures of culture distance and the assumption that it is correlated to acculturation stress. It presents evidence that in Australia, adopting an integration strategy, and addressing the cultural dimensions of Masculinity and Uncertainty-Avoidance have been shown to be successful in reducing acculturation stress. The most widely assumed dimensions to impact acculturation stress—Power-Distance, and Individualism— bear no association. It concludes that knowledge of the concepts discussed can help inform understanding acculturation but should be applied with caution, and should adopt an evidence-based approach.
Power-Distance, Culture-Distance and Why Size Doesn’t Matter: A Discussion of Acculturation Stress in Australian Immigrants.
Acculturation stress impacts immigrants’ ability to adapt to life in their new country (Berry, 1997) and can lead to serious consequences including debilitating depression (Maneze et al., 2016), anxiety disorders (Barrios, Andueza, & Ganzales, 2002), substance abuse (Delgado, 2001), physical illness (Sharma, 2012), family violence (Zannettino, 2012), radicalisation (Lyons, 2015) and even suicide (Cho & Haslam, 2010).
Australia is a nation of immigrants: with half our population either born overseas or having a parent born overseas (ABS, 2017), and approximately one-quarter of a million immigrants arriving each year (DIBP, 2017), it is relevant to explore the source and management of acculturation stress in Australian migrants.
This essay defines the concepts of cultural dimensions, culture distance, acculturation and acculturation stress, and their inter-relationships, focusing on the dominant paradigms put forward by Hofstede (2001a) and Berry (1997). It then presents an overview of limitations of the concepts, drawing attention to the assumption that culture distance correlates with acculturation stress. Looking specifically within Australia, it demonstrates that some of these concepts are more useful than others. In terms of how they can inform understanding and management of acculturation stress in Australian migration, caution is advisable.
Concepts of Culture
Acculturation
Acculturation occurs when two different cultures meet, and describes the changes that occur within the broader group for one culture to accommodate the other; and the psychological changes within individuals.
Berry (1997) suggests four discrete acculturation strategies that immigrants might adopt—integration, assimilation, segretation, and marginalisation—based on two core issues of maitaining heritage culture—the extent to which people seek to maintain their old/heritage culture; and embracing the host culture—the extent to which people seek to become involved in their new/host culture. Berry considers this in the context of Yes/No answers (p.10): in reality these are likely to be continuums, as represented below:
An integration strategy generally results in easier adaptation to the new culture and less acculturation stress; marginalisation and separation result in considerable stress, and assimilation is variable (Berry, 1997).
At an individual level, adaptation requires some aspects of culture “shedding” and culture “learning” as immigrants learn the ways and values of the new country and reconcile these with their own. Culture conflict is dissonance between the heritage culture, and the host culture.
Acculturation stress occurs when the magnitude of culture-conflict outstrips the individual’s abilities and strategies to cope with it. Berry (1997) identifies three levels of stress associated with adaptation: Shifts, when the individual accommodates small changes required by yielding to the norms of the new culture; acculturative stress, when individuals cannot easily accommodate the required changes; and psychopathology, or overwhelming stress, when changes exceed the individual’s ability to cope. These are conceptually represented below.
Other factors that influence acculturation stress include (Berry, 1997; Kashima & Abu-Rayya, 2014):
Individual pre-migration factors, including age, gender, marital status, motivation, expectations, personality traits, language skills;
Group-Level pre-migration factors, including political, economic, and demographic situations of the country of origin, and the attitudes and social support of the country of settlement;
Post-arrival factors, including length of time since arrival, coping strategies and resources available, social support, societal attitudes, and employment and economic opportunities.
Voluntariness also plays an important role. This has important implications for the thousands of refugees arriving in Australia each year (DIBP, 2017).
Cultural Dimensions
Cultural dimensions are a way of describing and comparing national cultures—how behaviours, values, and beliefs differ or are similar between countries. Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions (1980, 1983a, 2001)[1] is the most widely known framework (Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006), offering a measurement of national cultures on four separate continuums, or dimensions:[2]
Power Distance: the distance between those with power, and those without; the extent to which less powerful members of society accept that power is unequally distributed.
Individualism: how much individual rights and freedoms are valued, versus those of the group; the perception of people’s identity as individuals distinct from the collective.
Masculinity: how much assertiveness and dominance (considered masculine) are valued over nurturing (considered feminine).
Uncertainty-Avoidance: how comfortable a culture is with ambiguity: its peoples’ overall preference for avoiding uncertainty.
Hofstede’s dimensions are useful to understand what countries are ‘like’, and to compare similarities and differences. Consider the scores for Australia, the United Kingdom (U.K.), and Guatemala:
| Country | Power-Distance | Individualism | Uncertainty Avoidance | Masculinity | Calculated Cultural Distance from Australia |
| Australia | 36 | 90 | 51 | 61 | 0 |
| U.K. | 35 | 89 | 35 | 66 | 23 |
| Guatemala | 95 | 6 | 101 | 37 | 217 |
Table 1: Cultural dimensions of Australia, Guatemala, and United Kingdom, adapted from Hofstede (2001)
Guatemala has vastly different scores to Australia and most markedly on Individualism (6 versus 90) and Power-Distance (95 versus 36): intuitively, Guatemalans would have greater difficulty than British adjusting to Australia’s individualistic and egalitarian culture, and also on the other dimensions. Similarly, Australians would have difficulty accepting Guatemalan attitudes to hierarchy, collectivism, risk-averseness, and low assertiveness.
Culture Distance
Culture Distance (CD) describes how different one culture is from another. CD can be measured subjectively per Babiker, Cox, and Miller (1980), objectively on a single dimension per Kashima and Abu-Rayya (2014), or globally across all dimensions per Kogut and Singh (1988). The calculated CD in the above table’s last column demonstrates the global measure concept: summing the differences on each dimension, Guatemala is approximately nine times more culturally distant from Australia than is the U.K.
Larger CD is widely associated with greater acculturation stress (Berry, 1997). Nonetheless this association has come under scrutiny in recent years (Brouthers, Marshall & Keig, 2016; Shenkar, 2001; Zaheer, Schomaker & Nachum, 2012), discussed below.
Limitations of the Concepts
Berry’s acculturation framework is well supported in the literature and does not warrant a discussion of limitations. The concepts of cultural dimensions and culture distance, however, do.
Cultural Dimensions
Although Hofstede’s work is the most widely cited cultural framework (Kirkman et al, 2006), it has received considerable criticism regarding methodological deficiencies in the original study; a mono-corporate sample that is not readily extensible; failing to capture the mutability of culture; and overlooking within-country heterogeneity (Sivakuman & Nkata, 2001; Kirkman et al., 2006). Hofstede himself warns that his work “the result of exploratory research; it does not present a finished theory” (2001b, p. 16). Hofstede’s “theory” is nonetheless applied prolifically to international trade, change management, decision-making, education, social welfare, acculturation interventions, and many other realms (Kirkman et al, 2006). Its efficacy is only marginally evident and its results are inconsistently reliable (Caprar, Devinney, Kirkman, & Caligiuri, 2015; Kashima & Abu-Rayya, 2014; Geeraert & Demoulin, 2013). Despite cautions, the theory continues to be heavily cited, perhaps because of its appealingly simple approach to characterising the complexities of national cultures.
Culture Distance
The literature presents manifold challenges to the concept of culture distance, its measurement, hidden assumptions, and theoretical and methodological failings (Brouthers et al, 2016; Shenkar, 2001; Zaheer et al, 2012). Two additional issues are observed as follow.
First, Berry’s (1997) “Immigration, Acculturation, and Adaptation” has strongly influenced ensuing discussion around culture distance and acculturation stress. Berry (p.23) cites two cases in support of “the general and consistent finding is that the greater the cultural differences, the less positive is the adaptation”. Critical analysis, however, reveals that both cases used subjective measurements of CD based on a method from Babiker, Cox and Miller in 1980[3]—not Hofstede’s objective measurements—and there is no necessary correspondence between subjective and objective assessments (Suanet & van de Vijer, 2009). Yet greater differences in culture per Hofstede’s scale are often inferred in the literature as leading to greater acculturation stress, despite little empirical support for this association (Kashima & Abu-Rayya, 2014; Geeraert & Demoulin, 2013).
Second, there is no consistent approach to measuring culture distance, either objectively or subjectively, and different instruments return different results. Below, for example, an extract from Kashima & Abu-Rayaa (2014, p. 591) displays three standardly recognised frameworks—Hofstede (2001a): Smith, Dugan and Trompenaars (2009); and Schwartz (1994)—with radically contrasting CD scores between Australia and various countries (highlights by this author). Accordingly, a crucial question is which, if any, measure of CD should be used.
Application in Australia
Given the range of serious consequences of acculturation stress, evidence-based knowledge is vital to inform its management. Within Australia there is clear evidence that adopting an integration strategy results in better adaptation and multiple health benefits, including lower obesity (Renzaho, Swinburn, & Burns, 2008); increased job satisfaction (Lu, Samaratunge, & Härtel, 2012); increased social wellbeing (Buchanan, Abu-Rayya, Kashima, & Paxton, 2017); and better mental health (Sawrikar & Hunt, 2005). The same research shows that a marginalisation or separationstrategy facilitates increased obesity, lower job satisfaction, lower social wellbeing, higher rates of depression, anxiety, mental health disorders, and, notably in the ‘age of terror’, significantly higher risk of radicalisation (Lyons, 2015).
Clear evidence also casts doubt on the pervasive notion that greater culture distance means greater acculturation stress (Kashima & Abu-Rayya, 2014). Kashima and Abu-Rayya’s longitudinal study of 5,033 Australian immigrants from 49 countries demonstrates unequivocally that global scores of CD using Hofstede’s dimensions return a null association. Further, they indicate that Hofstede’s two dimensions most widely assumed to be major sources of acculturation stress—Power Distance and Individualism—also bear no association. The strongest association is with Masculinity, and a lesser but still significant association is with Uncertainty Avoidance. Other research has confirmed links for these dimensions, and null associations with Power Distance, Individualism, and global measures (Brouthers, et al., 2016; Geeraert & Demoulin, 2013).
Research on refugee populations in Australia, who are particularly vulnerable to acculturation stress because of the involuntary nature of their relocation, strongly supports that an integration strategy, and interventions addressing Masculinity and Uncertainty-Avoidance issues reduce acculturation stress (Khawaja & Milner, 2012; Joyce & Liamputtong, 2017; Fisher, 2013; Buchanan et al., 2017; Renzaho & Vignjevic, 2011). Interventions should also be cognisant of the time since arrival, as different time-periods are associated with different levels of stress, on different dimensions (Kashima & Abu-Rayya, 2014).
Conclusion
Given the gravity of the implications of acculturation stress, ranging from depression to violence, radicalisation, and suicide, understanding of its source—and interventions to manage it—must be empirically informed and relevant in an Australian context. Inaccurate understanding of what causes acculturation stress, in an Australian context, will plainly result in its ineffective management.
Intervention programs should encourage adoption of an integration approach but be cautious to avoid “the stampede towards Hofstede’s framework” (Sivakuman & Nkata, 2001), and of applying a simplistic measurement to culture distance. The source and management of acculturation stress should instead be informed by rigorous research, and Kashima & Abu-Rayya’s work provides an important starting point for this.
References
ABS. (2017, June 27). Census reveals a fast changing, culturally diverse nation. Retrieved from Australian Bureau of Statistics: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf
/lookup/Media%20Release3
Babiker, I., Cox, J., & Miller, P. M. (1980). The Measurement of Cultural Distance and its Relationship to Medical Consultations, Symptamology and Examination of Performance of Overseas Students at Edinburgh University. Social Psychiatry, 15, 109-116.
Barrios, N., Andueza, M., & Ganzales, R. (2002). Anxiety disorders related with acculturation stress. European Psychiatry, 17, 219.
Berry, J. (1997). Immigration, Acculturation, and Adaptation. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 46(1), 5-68.
Berry, J. (2003). Conceptual approaches to acculturation. In P. Chun, & P. Balls Organista, Acculturation: Advances in Theory, Measurement, and Applied Research (pp. 17-37).
Brouthers, L. E., Marshall, V. B., & Keig, D. L. (2016). Solving the single-country sample problem in cultural distance studies. Journal of International Business Studies, 47(4), 471-479.
Buchanan, Z. E., Abu-Rayya, H. M., Kashima, E., & Paxton, S. J. (2017, Dec). The Interconnection between Acculturation and Subjective and Social Wellbeing among Refugee Youth in Australia. Journal of Refugee Studies, 30(4), 511-529. doi:10.1093/jrs/few040
Caprar, D. v., Devinney, T. M., Kirkman, B. L., & Caligiuri, P. (2015). Conceptualizing and measuring culture in international business and management: From challenges to potential solutions. Journal of International Business Studies, 46, 1011-1027.
Cho, Y.-B., & Haslam, N. (2010, Apr). Suicidal Ideation and Distress Among Immigrant Adolescents: The Role of Acculturation, Life Stress, and Social Support. Journal of Youth & Adolescence, 39(4), 370-379. doi:10.1007/s10964-009-9415-y
Delgado, A. (2001). Acculturation, Acculturation Stress, and Substance Abuse Among Latino Males. California State University. Long Beach: (Order No. 1423169). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global (305039308). Retrieved from https://search
-proquest-com.ezproxy.cdu.edu.au/docview/305039308?accountid=10424
DIBP. (2017). Department of Immigration and Border Protect Annual Report 2016-2017. Retrieved from Refugee Council of Australia: https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au
/getfacts/statistics/aust/dibp-2016-2017/
Geeraert, N., & Demoulin, S. (2013). Acculturative Stress or Resilience? A Longitudinal Multilevel Analysis of Sojourners Stress and Self-Esteem. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 44(8), 1241-1262. doi:10.1177/0022022113478656
Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s Consequencs: International Differences in Work-Related Values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Hofstede, G. (1983). NATIONAL CULTURES IN FOUR DIMENSIONS: A Research-Based Theory of Cultural Differences Among Nations. International Studies of Management and Organization, 13(1-2), 46-74.
Hofstede, G. (2001a). Culture’s Consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations. (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, U.K.: Sage.
Hofstede, G. (2001b). Culture’s Recent Consequences: Using Dimension Scores in Theory and Research. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, Special Commentary: The Study of Cross Cultural Management and Organization – Past, Present and Future, 11-30.
Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and post-modernization: Cultural, economic and political change in 43 societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kashima, E. S., & Abu-Rayya, H. M. (2014). Longitudinal Associations of Cultural Distance With Psychological Well-Being Among Australian Immigrants From 49 Countries. Journal of Corss-Cultural Psychology, 45(4), 587-600. doi:10.1177/0022022113519857
Kirkman, B., Lowe, K., & Gibson, C. (2006, May). A Quarter Century of “Culture’s Consequences”: A Review of Empirical Research. Journal of International Business Studies, 37(3). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3875261
Kogut, B., & Singh, H. (1988). The effect of national culture on the choice of entry mode. Journal of International Business Studies, 19(3), 441-432. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8490394
Lu, Y., Samaratunge, R., & Härtel, C. E. (2012). The relationship between acculturation strategy and job satisfaction for professional Chinese immigrants in the Australian workplace. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 36(5), 669-681. doi:10.1016/j.ijintrel.2012.04.003
Lyons, S. L. (2015). The psychological foundations of homegrown radicalization: An immigrant acculturation perspective. University of Maryland. Proquest Dissertations Publishing (Order No. 3711729). Retrieved from https://search-proquest
-com.ezproxy.cdu.edu.au/docview/1707359313?accountid=10424
Maneze, D., Salamonson, Y., Poudel, C., DiGiacomo, M., Everett, B., & Davidson, P. M. (2016, Aug). Health-Seeking Behaviors of Filipino Migrants in Australia: The Influence of Persisting Acculturative Stress and Depression. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 18(4), 779-786. doi:10.1007/s10903-015-0233-x
Matsumoto, D., & Juang, L. (2017). Culture and Psychology (6th ed.). Boston MA: Cengage Learning.
Renzaho, A., Swinburn, B., & Burns, C. (2008). Maintenance of traditional cultural orientation is associated with lower rates of obesity and sedentary behaviours among African migrant children to Australia. International Journal of Obesity, 38(2), 594-600.
Sawrikar, P., & Hunt, C. (2005). The Relationship Between Mental Health, Cultural Identity and Cultural Values in Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) Australian Adolescents. Behaviour Change, 22(2), 97-113.
Schwartz, S. (1994). Beyond individualism/collectivism: New cultural dimensions of values. In H. Triandis, C. Kagitcibaci, S. Choi, & G. (. Yoon, Individualism and collectivism: Theory, Method, and Applications (pp. 85-122). London: Sage.
Sharma, S. (2012). Psychological distress among Australians and immigrants: Findings from the 2007 National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing. Advances in Mental Health, 10(2), 106-116. doi:10.5172/jamh.2011.10.2.106
Shenkar, O. (2001). Cultural Distance Revisited: Towards a more rigourous conceptualization and measurement of cultural differences. Journal of International Business Studies, 32(3), 519-535.
Sivakuman, K., & Nkata, C. (2001). The stampede toward Hofstede’s framework: avoiding the sample design pit in cross- cultural research. Journal of International Business Studies, 32(3), 555-574.
Smith, P., Dugan, S., & Trompenaars, F. (2009). National culture and the values of organizational employees: A dimensional analysis across 43 nations. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 19, 181-187.
Suanet, I., & van de Vijer, F. (2009). Perceived cultural distance and acculturation among exchange students in Russia. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 19, 181-197.
Zaheer, S., Schomaker, M. S., & Nachum, L. (2012). Distance without direction: Restoring credibility to a much-loved construct. Journal of International Business Studies, 43(1), 18-27. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41408887
Zannettino, L. (2012). “…There is No War Here; It is Only the Relationship That Makes Us Scared”: Factors Having an Impact on Domestic Violence in Liberian Refugee Communities in South Australia. Violence Against Women, 18(7), 807-828. doi:10.1177/1077801212455162
[1] Originally published in 1980 and subsequently revised and republished in 2001.
[2] Two other dimensions were later added. These are not discussed here for the sake of brevity.
[3] Further, the original Babiker et.al research concludes “cultural distance per se is no handicap to overseas students”.
