| Acculturation has been widely observed and studied by Western researchers in thesecond half of the20th Century with the intensification and extension of globalizationand the constant increase of international and interregional mobility of people. Westernscholars have put forward several influential theories and models. But in China, relevantresearch has just begun. The research of acculturation of foreign sojourners in China hasvery important realistic meaning for the improvement of their acculturation in China.In recent years, the economic and trade cooperation presents a rapid growthmomentum. As China has gradually become African’s largest trading partner, the numberof African immigrant, overseas student and business expatriate is increasing sharply. Thecommon challenges stemmed from cultural difference and social conflicts have made theacculturation of African sojourners in China an inevitably practical problem.Since the beginning of reform and opening up, in southern China, the metropolitancity, Guangzhou is often considered by many African businessmen as the first andpermanent destination when coming to China. There are tens and thousands of Africanbusinessmen gathered in Guangzhou. Such a huge foreign group deserves our attentionand their acculturation status in Guangzhou should never be neglected. This thesis takesacculturation of West African businessmen in Guangzhou as the research subject. Basedon the retrospect and summarization of previous studies on acculturation both at homeand abroad, this thesis analyzes the reason why Guangzhou is their first choice ofdestination in China. Then, through referring and quoting Colleen Ward’s two dimensionsof acculturation theory and model as the theoretical framework, present researchmeasures and evaluates the acculturation status of West African businessmen from bothpsychological and socio-cultural aspects. The author also chooses five interculturalcontact factors including ethnic identity, national language proficiency, ingroup andoutgroup social interaction, perceived discrimination and self-esteem to test thehypotheses of the correlation between each intercultural contact factor and psychological and socio-cultural adaptation.The author modifies the questionnaires devised by previous scholars and formulates aquestionnaire for present research. Through two months on site investigation,132piecesof questionnaires are collected back and70of them are valid for the final analysis. All thedata from the questionnaires are loaded into SPSS19.0. Present research uses descriptivestatistics to analyze the demographics of the samples, means and standard deviation totest the reason of their coming to Guangzhou and acculturation status of the samples andPearson correlation test to evaluate the correlation between each of the five interculturalcontact factors and two aspects of acculturation status.The results reveal that in terms of reasons of West African businessmen for coming toGuangzhou, all of the four reasons are playing important roles. But within these fourreasons the top two are business and culture. Through the data analysis, the respondentsare somewhat unwell adapted in terms of Socio-cultural adaptation. But they arepsychologically well adapted, which means they met some psychological problems butnot too much. And they can manage them quite well. The socio-cultural adaptation has noclear correlation with ethnic identity and self-esteem. It is positively correlated withlanguage proficiency but negatively correlated with Ingroup and outgroup socialinteraction and Perceived discrimination. The psychological adaptation has no obviouscorrelation with language proficiency and Ingroup and outgroup social interaction. It isnegatively correlated with ethnic identity and perceived discrimination but positivelycorrelated with self-esteem.In the end, the thesis provides constructive suggestions for the acculturation ofAfrican businessmen in China based on the results of data analysis and points out thelimitations. |
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