This article presents an expanded model of acculturation among international migrants and their immediate descendants. Acculturation is proposed as a multidimensional process consisting of the confluence among heritage-cultural and receiving-cultural practices, values, and identifications. The implications of this reconceptualization for the acculturation construct, as well as for its relationship to psychosocial and health outcomes, are discussed. In particular, an expanded operationalization of acculturation is needed to address the “immigrant paradox,” whereby international migrants with more exposure to the receiving cultural context report poorer mental and physical health outcomes. We discuss the role of ethnicity, cultural similarity, and discrimination in the acculturation process, offer an operational definition for context of reception, and call for studies on the role that context of reception plays in the acculturation process. The new perspective on acculturation presented in this article is intended to yield a fuller understanding of complex acculturation processes and their relationships to contextual and individual functioning.

Assessing change in family functioning as a result of treatment: The Structural Family Systems Rating Scale (SFSR).

Hispanic youth and their families to extend the concept of contextualism. First, it discusses family and culture as literatures that have emerged from a contextualist perspective but are separate from each other. Second, it integrates these literatures by introducing the concept of the embeddedness of the individual within the context of the family within the context of culture. Finally, this concept of the embeddedness of contexts is extended to encompass a view of families embedded within culturally diverse contexts.Editor's note. Articles based on APA award addresses that appear in the American Psychologist are scholarly articles by distinguished contributors to the field. As such, they are given special consideration in the American Psychologist's editorial selection process.

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This article presents evidence for the effectiveness of a strategy for engaging adolescent drug users and their families in therapy. The intervention method is based on strategic, structural, and systems concepts. To overcome resistance, the identified pattern of interactions that interferes with entry into treatment is restructured. Subjects were 108 Hispanic families in which an adolescent was suspected of. or was observed, using drugs. Subjects were randomly assigned to a strategic structuralsystems engagement (experimental) condition or to an engagement-as-usual (control) condition.Subjects in the experimental condition were engaged at a rate of 93% compared with subjects in the control condition, who were engaged at a rate of 42%. Seventy-seven percent of subjects in the experimental condition completed treatment compared wiih 25"! of subjects in the control condition.Recent research has suggested that strategic, structural, family interventions are highly effective in the treatment ot multiple substance abusing adolescents (Szapocznik. Kurtines, Foote, Perez-Vidal, & Hervis, 1983. However, although family interventions may be more effective than individual interventions in treating drug abuse (Kaufman* Kaufman, 1979: Stanton, 1980, the engagement of families of drug abusers remains a serious problem. Stanton and his collaborators (Stanton, 1979;Stanton & Todd, 1981) have suggested that the problem of engaging drug abusers in treatment has been one of the most urgent obstacles to service delivery with this population. Our prior research (Szapocznik, Kurtines etal., 1983 has revealed that a substantial proportion of clients are lost prior to the first treatment session, thus confirming the difficulties inherent in engaging drug abusers in treatment. For example, in a project that investigated the treatment efficacy of drug-abusing adolescents, only 250 client families of approximately 650 initial contacts actually came in for a screening interview. Of this number, only 145 completed the intake procedure and only 72 completed treatment. Clearly, our data show that a very large proportion of client families who initially seek treatment are not engaged in therapy. Recognition of the problem of engagement has resulted in a number of attempts to develop strategies for recruiting drug abusers and their families in treatment (e.g..