The Relationship Between Bicultural Identity Integration And Psychological Adaptation

With the fairness and reforming of education deepening,an increasing number of minority students flock in Han culture dominated regions to live and learn.At this stage,they must face a serious problem,which asks them to deal with the relationship between native culture and mainstream culture.Bicultural identity integration(BII)believes to be a novel research idea in identity research field,which investigates how individuals organize two different kinds of cultural identities.Cultural distance and blending,together with cultural conflict and harmony make up two dimensions of BII.BII is closely related to the level of psychological adaption.Therefore,This research selected 247 Tibetan middle school students,to project identified and compared the relationship between BII and their current state of psychological adaption(study 1).In a basis of study 1,this project find 144 Tibetan students,in May-June in 2014 for the first time to collecting data,and in May-June in 2015 again to the data collecting.The study explores the BII and psychological adapt of the same students,and adopts the cross-lagged regression analyses to observe the tendency of change in BII and psychological adaption of northwest Tibetan undergraduates in the past 12 months,and further investigate the correlation between these two variables(study 2).The following findings can be conclude from our questionnaire and data analysis:(1)In the study I: A significant positive correlation was found between psychological adaption and BII in each dimension.After controlling gender variables,BII can notably forward predict psychological adaption.(2)In the study II:(1)BII(includes harmonious and conflict dimension,hybrid and distinguish dimension)and psychological adaptation(includes life satisfaction,subjective happiness sense,depression,anxiety,self-esteem and loneliness dimensions)changed in different time point(T1,T2);(2)BII(includes harmonious dimension and conflict dimension)could predict the psychological adaptation(includes life satisfaction,anxiety and depression dimensions).At the same time,by the cross sectional analysis between different variables,we(3)found that the BII conflict dimension is the premise of psychological adaptation anxiety and life satisfaction dimension.This study found that high levels of dual cultural identity integration can reduce the individual anxiety level,and the individual life satisfaction evaluation.it shows that the an multicultural individual identity will impact on their psychological health level significantly.Most important of all,bicultural identity integration level increased steadily during the past year in the Tibetan college students group.In this process cultural harmony and conflict played a more important role.The result of Cross-lagged regression analyses found that causal evidence between the BII(harmony and conflict dimension)and psychological adaptation(anxiety and life satisfaction).But the precondition between cultural harmony and conflict and anxiety will be declined,different from this,the precondition between cultural harmony and conflict and life satisfaction will be increased.Our study could expand the field of study about Bicultural identity integration,at the same time,deepen our understanding for the multicultural individual psychological adaptation,and provide a theoretical support for the means of improving the psychological adaptation level of Zang and Han bicultural students.In addition,this study also reminds us that as a multi-ethnic country,we must seek some ways and means to increase the Bicultural identity integration of ethnic groups.