A quadripartite approach to analysing young British South Asian adults’ dual cultural identity

Abstract

Adopting an acculturation perspective, this article explicates the duality of young British South Asian adults’ cultural dispositions. In so doing, it examines the complex dialectic processes that influence their acculturation strategies. By using a maximum variation sampling method, respondents from six major cities in Great Britain were interviewed for this study. The findings show that young British South Asian adults exhibit attributes of both of their ancestral and host cultures. Their dual cultural identity is constituted due to four major reasons: consonances with ancestral culture, situational constraints, contextual requirements and conveniences. This quadripartite perspective informs a non-context-specific theoretical model of acculturation. Marketing managers seeking to serve this diaspora market (and others) can utilise this theoretical framework in order to more fully comprehend diaspora members’ religiosity, social, communal and familial bonding and other cultural dispositions and, moreover, their manifestations in their day-to-day lives.