Catalogue of Acculturation Constructs: Descriptions of 126 Taxonomies, 1918-2003

Abstract

Acculturation refers to the processes by which individuals, families, communities, and societies react to inter-cultural contact. Advances in communication and transportation technologies, and increasing migration pressures due to demographic, economic, environmental, human rights, and security disparities, make acculturation one of the most important topics for applied research in cross-cultural psychology. However, progress in acculturation research has been frustrated by our inabilities to pit theories against each other in meaningful ways, to summarize results by meta-analytic methods, or to improve constructs and scales all because we have been unaware of the interdisciplinary breadth of acculturation research and its historical depth. This annotated bibliography of acculturation taxonomies presents an accessible historical foundation to the literature on acculturation. The most ancient psychological discussion of acculturation appears to be that of Plato in 348 BC. In the early 19th century, DeTocqueville speculated about acculturation processes in Europe and America. The word "acculturation" was first used in 1880, and by 1900 scholars were already writing histories of acculturation theory. G. Stanley Hall was the first psychologist to write about acculturation, and Thomas and Znaniecki presented the first full psychological theory in 1918. Since then, more than 100 different taxonomies of acculturation have been published, most of them cited and summarized here.