Parents and children only? Acculturation and the influence of extended family members among Vietnamese refugees

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Abstract

The nuclear family is often the point of departure in much of the existing acculturation research on refugee youth and children of refugees. The influence of other extended family members appears to receive less attention in understanding acculturation processes and intergenerational perspectives. This qualitative study explores the influence of extended family members upon a small sample of Vietnamese refugee parents and their adolescents while they undergo acculturation through their long-term resettlement process in Norway. With repeated interviews over a time span of 3 years, we identified situations and processes in family life in which extended kin become particularly activated and influential. Vietnamese refugee families in Norway keep close contact with extended kin even in the face of geographical distance to kin remaining in Vietnam, or globally dispersed. Aunts, uncles, and cousins are experienced as significant persons in the lives of many adolescents. Additionally, birth order of parents can often influence relationship dynamics among siblings and siblings children. Extended kin surfaced as especially important and influential at critical stages and crisis situations in family life. Extended family, and in particular, parental siblings play important roles in the acculturation experience and family functioning of Vietnamese refugee families in Norway. This has important implications for the study of Vietnamese and other refugee and immigrant families in acculturation research.

Highlights

► We explored the influence of extended family members in the acculturation processes. ► Vietnamese refugee families in Norway keep close contact with extended kin. ► Aunts, uncles, and cousins are experienced as significant in the lives of many adolescents. ► Extended kin surfaced as especially important at critical stages in family life. ► This has implications for how we study refugee families in acculturation research.

Introduction

Families play a central role in the lives of many refugees by helping to organize, understand, and make sense of daily experience (Chun, 2006). Although researchers agree that acculturation takes place within the context of family, most attention has been devoted to the subsystem of parents and their offspring. The relationship between parents and adolescents in exile is seen as challenging as they engage a new culture and retain affiliation with their culture of origin often at different rates (Birman, 2006, Bornstein and Cote, 2006). As a result, “acculturation gaps” can be potentially problematic for parent–child relationships (Birman, 2006, Kwak, 2003, Nguyen and Williams, 1989, Rosenthal et al., 1996), impacting the health and well being of family members (Sam, 2006).

The Vietnamese family is often presented as a strong extended kinship unit preoccupied with “collective family interests” (Beiser, 1999, Matsouka, 1990, Nguyen and Williams, 1989, Nidorf, 1985, Rosenthal et al., 1996). Despite this, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the main research focus on how Vietnamese families acculturate in exile has been at the nuclear family level. Hence, the influence of the extended family has remained until now a relatively unexplored field and the role of extended kinship family members remains unclear in Vietnamese parent–adolescent acculturation experiences in exile.

Acculturation is the process of cultural and individual psychological change resulting from the meeting of two cultures, while adaptation is a consequence of acculturation determining subjective well-being and sociocultural competence, and acculturative stress is a stress response to life events rooted in the experience of acculturation (Sam & Berry, 2010). Berry, 2003, Berry, 2006, Berry, 2008 argues individuals and groups undergoing acculturation can use different acculturation strategies based in their orientation to two central attitudinal dimensions regarding cultural maintenance of their own group and desirability of inter-group contact. In this model, individuals choose one of four acculturation strategies: assimilation, integration, separation, or marginalization. The acculturation profile that an individual young person adopts reflect both these strategies, and the young person's orientation to intercultural issues such as: cultural identities, language use and proficiency, peer relations, and family relations values (Berry, Phinney, Sam, & Vedder, 2006). These acculturation profiles extend beyond strategies to include acculturation attitudes, cultural identities, language use and knowledge, values, and attitudes regarding social relations.

Acculturation stress is the result of cultural differences found between the host culture and the person's culture of origin, which can impact the adaptation of individuals or groups undergoing acculturation (Sam & Berry, 2010). The variation in and the intensity of this stress rests heavily on the similarities or dissimilarities between the host culture and that of the new entrants, including personal characteristics, amount of exposure, level of education and skills, sex, age, language, race, and psychological and spiritual strengths (Berry, 2006). In addition, immigrant youth frequently engage in the new culture and attain sociocultural competencies, particularly language facility, at different rates from their parents (Berry et al., 2006). For refugees, as an added burden, acculturative stress often co-occurs while simultaneously coping with the consequences of human rights violations, recovery from trauma, flight from the county of origin, and asylum seeking. These additional stressors further complicate the acculturation experience for refugee families (Allen, Vaage, & Hauff, 2006).

In acculturation research, a number of studies have addressed the intergenerational relationship between immigrant parents and their adolescent children (c.f., Berry et al., 2006). As a point of departure, researchers often stress that adolescents typically seek a new cultural identity. Young people are exposed to cultural values belonging to the country of resettlement by attending school. They also obtain fluency in a language new to them and socialize with young people from the country of resettlement. On the other hand, parents are mostly portrayed as lagging behind their children in strivings to obtain cultural competence, language proficiency, and access to the labor market. Parents are described as clinging to cultural values belonging to their country of origin and developing cross-cultural competencies at a slower pace than their adolescent children (Birman, 2006, Costigan and Dokis, 2006).

A relatively large body of accounts describing family life and household structures in the Vietnamese refugee context has been published ranging from well grounded historical, anthropological, and sociological inquiries, to interviews by journalists in war-torn Vietnam, to studies of refugee behavior in transit camps (Woon, 1986). This existing literature includes several descriptions of the size and structure of Vietnamese families, and the roles and status of women in the domestic sphere.

As a result of occupations, war, and social disturbances, many Vietnamese families have been broken up and new structures of organizing family life have emerged. Several authors argue an understanding of the political history of Vietnam is necessary in order to gain insight into how these families organize themselves and how they have changed over time (Knudsen, 1988, McLeod and Nguyen, 2001, Woon, 1986). The French colonial administration (1862–1940), the upheaval of the Confucian traditional society, the Japanese occupation in the Second World War, French new-colonialism (1945–1963), the separation of Vietnam (North–South), and the civil war and intervention of the USA leading to the fall of Saigon in 1975, have all affected family structure. The need to organize the family in wartime necessitated new arrangements and inventive cooperation among and within families.

Statements and observations made about families in Vietnam display great variation. Some authors describe the Vietnamese family in their home country as a harmonious, extended unit where women occupy a subordinate position in the domestic sphere (Chan and Lam, 1983, Vuong, 1976). Others argue that Vietnamese families are predominantly nuclear in structure in their home country, with married siblings forming separate households upon marriage, and that women enjoy a high domestic status (Chi, 1980, Van Esterik, 1980). The Vietnamese family is often described as emphasizing filial piety and respect for the elderly (Nguyen and Williams, 1989, Pyke, 2000, Rosenthal et al., 1996, Zhou and Bankston, 1994) with family interests taking precedence over personal interests. Adolescents are expected to fulfill their responsibilities to the family and pay tribute to the family lineage (Kwak and Berry, 2001, Matsouka, 1990, Nidorf, 1985). Filial relationships with family members and family harmony are among the highest priorities within the Vietnamese culture.

In contrast, Vietnamese refugees have resettled into societies in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Northern Europe that possess cultural values aligned with individual uniqueness, autonomy, and the family formed through marriage (Morrow, 1989, Ying and Chao, 1996). These differences increase the risk of intergenerational difficulties among Vietnamese refugees (Ying & Han, 2007). This risk is most prominent during adolescence, when separation and individuation from parents and the forgoing of an independent identity are normative developmental objectives in the Western world (Erikson, 1968, Marcia, 1980), whereas greater interdependence and the assumption of increasing adult responsibilities to the family are expected for Southeast Asian adolescents (Xiong et al., 2005, Ying and Chao, 1996). These cultural differences that pose challenges for intergenerational relationships in contemporary Vietnamese refugee families are related to the degree of autonomy that adolescents claim in relation to their parents, and how decisions are made or negotiated across the two generations.

Despite the intergenerational challenges, the Vietnamese refugee population in Norway reports to be content in many life aspects (Vaage et al., 2009). Most importantly, self-reported psychological distress has decreased significantly over the time of settlement in Norway. There remains, however, a substantially higher proportion of the refugee group reaching threshold scores on standard measures of psychological distress 23 years after resettlement, as compared to the Norwegian general population (Vaage et al., 2010). However, in contrast, self-reported mental health of second-generation Vietnamese adolescents was better than that of a Norwegian ethnic comparison group. This was a surprising result and needs to be interpreted with caution; these results might point towards positive benefits of bicultural competencies, or it might instead relate to biased reporting attributable to cultural factors such as cultural differences in reporting emotional and behavioral problems (Vaage et al., 2009).

In refugee acculturation research, it is frequently stressed that extensive negotiations occur among refugee parents and adolescents (Birman, 2006, Nguyen et al., 1999, Ying and Han, 2007). Parents strive to transmit their ethnic culture to their offspring, while children attempt to balance the teachings of their ethnic culture with their experiences in the new culture (Kwak and Berry, 2001, Ho, 2010, Rosenthal et al., 1996, Szapocznik and Kurtines, 1993). However, this research focus stressing “acculturation gaps” and acculturation dissonance ignores ways in which extended kinship networks affect parent–adolescent acculturation over time.

The impact of other family members appears to receive little attention in this literature. This near exclusive focus on the nuclear family contradicts research that emphasizes how the home culture of Vietnamese refugees emphasizes a collectivistic orientation (Knudsen, 1988, Longva, 1987, Nidorf, 1985, Woon, 1986). The current research focus seems to assume Vietnamese families move away from these collectivistic and extended family values when migrating to a culture described to hold individualistic values. In her model of family change, Kağitçibaşi (1996) questions this assumption by early modernization theories that claim the “the isolated nuclear family” or the “conjugal family” to be the most functional in societies at a certain level of industrialization (Goode, 1963, Parsons, 1943) with their assumptions of inevitable changes in the constitution of the family and family relationships following migration (Kağitçibaşi, 1996). Recent critiques also call into question current conceptualizations of acculturation and its measurement (Bhatia and Ram, 2001, Chirkov, 2009, Rudmin, 2009, Ward and Kagitcibasi, 2010). Accordingly, researchers have called for application of various epistemological and methodological inter- and multidisciplinary approaches, along with the use of narrative and other qualitative methods that might allow for greater focus on the complexities of acculturation process and change (Chirkov, 2009, Tardif-Williams and Fisher, 2009).

This paper explores the extended family relationships of Vietnamese refugee parents and their adolescent children living in Norway using a qualitative methodology. Our review could locate no studies investigating how extended kinship relations in refugee families of Vietnamese origin impact the acculturation experience for parents and their adolescent offspring in exile. The paper explores two research questions: (1) how do extended family members influence the acculturation process of adolescents and their parents, and (2) in what situations or stages in family life do extended kin become particularly influential during the acculturation process?

Section snippets

Participants

Families were selected from a longitudinal prospective survey initiated by the last author with a cohort of 145 Vietnamese refugees on arrival to Norway in 1982 (T1) and followed up in 1985 (T2; Hauff, 1998). After 23 years of settlement in Norway, the cohort was recontacted in 2005/2006 (T3), and 80 of the original 145 refugees could be located and agreed to be re-interviewed. The participants at T3 also included 38 spouses along with 127 children born in Norway (ages 4–23). At T3, the data

Closeness and communication with extended family members

Our study indicates that families keep close contact with extended kin. Communication between parents and their siblings living in Norway, Vietnam, or elsewhere was sustained over the years in exile. Most of the parents in this study had one or several sisters or brothers in Norway. Some families were traveling to visit siblings (as well as other relatives) in Vietnam every year or every second year. Contact between siblings living in different European countries would often take place more

Discussion

Our study indicates the importance of broadening the scope of investigation to include extended family members in understanding acculturation processes and intergenerational relationships among Vietnamese refugee families, and more generally, among many refugee and immigrant families from other cultural groups. This approach can detect more of the family dynamics and functioning in daily life. In our study, extended kin members including aunts, uncles (parents’ siblings) and cousins were

Acknowledgements

The project described was supported by the Norwegian Extra Foundation for Health and Rehabilitation through Extra Funds. The work of the third author was supported by Award Number R24MD001626 from the National Center for Minority Health Disparities, and P20RR016430 from the National Center for Research Resources, both from the National Institutes of Health. We wish to thank interpreter and assistant Mimi Tran Nguyen for successful cooperation. Michelle Dondanville, Center for Alaska Native

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