A Research On Psychological Acculturation And Identity Conflict Among Chinese Sojourners And Immigrants In Budapest, Hungary

An early and continuing topic in the development of intercultural communication research is how sojourners adapt to new situations. Taking the opportunity of five-month stay in Budapest, Hungary, and with one year of intercultural and cross-cultural psychology theoretical background, this paper adopts quantitative and qualitative methods, from both emic (local context situated) and etic (universal framework oriented) perspectives to explore the acculturation, adaptation, and identity conflict among Chinese sojourners and immigrants in Budapest, Hungary. At the same time, this paper seeks to make clearer the function of identity conflict in the field of psychological acculturation, so as to contribute to identity study as an important core of intercultural communication field.What are the social and historical characteristics of Chinese sojourners and immigrants in Budapest? What are their acculturation styles? How do they adapt their lives in Hungarian society psychologically and socio-culturally? Do they have an identity conflict? Do they perceive discrimination from local people? How do they perceive their co-nationals? What's the relationship among their acculturation styles, adaptive outcomes, and identity conflict? How does this affect their intercultural communication? What implications can the study of this emic group contribute to intercultural and cross-cultural psychology? This thesis addresses these questions.According to Interior Minister Database in May, 2000, the overwhelming majority of the Chinese in Hungary (82%) reside in Hungarian capital city Budapest. Therefore, a study within Budapest was conducted to present a snapshot of Chinese sojourners and immigrants in Hungary.These questions are approached to with a mixed method, quantitative and qualitative study. In the quantitative study, questionnaires with variables of acculturation attitudes, socio-cultural/psychological adaptation, perceived discrimination, identity conflict, and demographic information are composed and distributed through various channels to 73 Chinese respondents in Budapest. After processing reliability tests descriptive analysis, correlation, ANOVA, and Crosstabs, it is concluded that the respondents majorly adopt integration and separation strategies to acculturate to Hungarian society. Their general socio-cultural and psychological adaptations are reasonably positive, but they perceive certain degree of discrimination. There are also several variables showing significant differences among respondents in their adaptations, such as age, gender, career, reason of coming, original region, religion, language ability, length of residence, future planning, of which length of residence and gender is an influential one.In the qualitative study, one 2-hour focus group discussion, 4 face-to-face in-depth interviews have been conducted to further explore Chinese people's acculturation experiences, difficulties, identity conflict, and perceptions on local people and co-nationals. The group discussion and interviews have been recorded and transcribed, which are followed by content analysis. The most influential topics are presented and discussed in the latter part of this study. Through comparing and contracting the results drawn from both methods, it is shown that quantitative and qualitative studies well complement each other to enrich the research findings.Focusing on the psychological adaptation of individual Chinese in the Hungarian context is the core feature of this study. Meanwhile, the present study, to some extent, also reveals the status of Chinese sojourners and immigrants in Hungary. These results will not provide useful guidance for helping this group adapt more effectively to local society in the future, but also arouse new thinking in the development of IC discipline.