Bicultural Identity and Self-Construal in-Family Among Indian American Emerging Adults: A Mixed-Methods Study

Examining the Role of Cultural and Family Factors in Substance Use Risk Among Indian American Youth

INTRODUCTION

Although Indian Americans constitute the second-largest immigrant group in the United States, there is a paucity of information about Indian American youth, particularly with respect to substance use risk. We examined the relationship of social factors to permissive substance use beliefs (a proxy for substance use risk since they can lead to adulthood substance use and misuse) and family functioning.

METHODS

The study used structural equation modeling to examine the prevalence of permissive substance use beliefs in a sample of Indian American youth ages 12-17 (N = 223) and examined the degree to which discrimination, bicultural identity integration, and endorsement of the model minority stereotype were associated with permissive substance use beliefs.

RESULTS

Findings suggest that bicultural identity integration (B = 0.267 [SE = 0.112], p = 0.01) and discrimination (B = 0.294 [SE = 0.087], p = 0.001) are positively associated with permissive substance use beliefs. Bicultural identity integration (B = 0.415 [SE = 0.090], p = 0.0001) was positively associated with family support (B= -0.329 [SE = 0.108], p = 0.002) which, in turn, was associated with less permissive substance use beliefs. In contrast, endorsement of the model minority stereotype (B = 0.351 [SE = 0.090], p = 0.001) was positively associated with family closeness (B = 0.232 [SE = 0.927], p = 0.01) which, in turn, was associated with family support and then with less permissive substance use beliefs.

CONCLUSIONS

Discrimination and bicultural identity integration emerged as key constructs related to substance use risk among Indian American youth. These youth could benefit from culturally appropriate prevention programming that addresses the negative impact of discrimination and its effect on permissive substance use beliefs and highlights protective factors.

Aligning personal and collective interests in emerging adults during the COVID-19 emergency in Italy

This study investigated the relations of emerging adults' personal (civic competence and interdependent self-construal) and community-based (sense of community and civic engagement) resources as predictors of appraisal of COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Management (PHEM) and attitudes toward preventing contagion in Italy. Participants were 2873 Italian emerging adults (71% females) aged 19-30 years (M = 22.67, SD = 2.82). Structural equation modeling revealed both direct and indirect positive associations among study variables. Civic competence and interdependent self-construal were related to sense of community and civic engagement behavior which, in turn, predicted appraisal of PHEM. Appraisal of PHEM in turn predicted attitudes toward preventing contagion. Overall, findings highlight the importance of examining the alignment between personal and collective interests to understand emerging adults' evaluative and attitudinal experiences during a period of crisis, such as that created by COVID-19.

Yes! I love my mother as much as myself: Self- and mother-association effects in an Indian sample

Information associated with the self is preferentially processed compared to information associated with others. However, cultural differences appear to exist in the way information is processed about those close to us like our mothers. In Eastern compared with Western cultures, information about the mother seems to be processed as well as our self. However, it is not clear whether this lack of difference is due to familiarity or would extend to processing arbitrary perceptual information associated with different categorical labels. The current study employs a perceptual association paradigm in which category labels like self, mother, and none are associated with arbitrary shapes to study self versus mother processing in an Indian sample. We hypothesised that there would be no difference between self and mother processing given the familial and collectivistic tendencies in India. Participants in two experiments performed a matching task between a shape and a pre-assigned category label, with self, mother, and none as categories in Experiment 1A and self, friend, and none as categories in Experiment 1B. As expected, analysis of response times (RT), accuracies, and signal detection theoretic measures showed that information about mother is processed as well as self in Experiment 1A, but this effect is not present with friend in Experiment 1B. Moreover, participants' processing for the self-associated information gets attenuated depending upon the other close person category used in the task (friend vs. mother) indicating that self-information processing is dynamically dependent on the categorical contexts in which such processing takes place. Our findings have implications for understanding the processing of self-associated information across cultures and contexts.