Spontaneous self-descriptions and ethnic identities in individualistic and collectivistic cultures.

Abstract

The Twenty Statements Test (TST) was administered in Seoul and New York, to 454 students from 2 cultures that emphasize collectivism and individualism, respectively. Responses, coded into 33 categories, were classified as either abstract or specific and as either autonomous or social. These 2 dichotomies were more independent in Seoul than in New York. The New York sample included Asian American whose spontaneous social identities differed. They either never listed ethnicity-nationality on the TST, or listed it once or twice. Unidentified Asian Americans' self-concepts resembled Euro-Americans' self-concepts, and twice identified Asian Americans' self-concepts resembled Koreans' self-concepts, in both abstractness-specificity and autonomy-sociality. Differential acculturation did not account for these results. Implications for social identity, self-categorization, and acculturation theory are discussed.

Ethnic self-awareness as a function of ethnic group status, group composition, and ethnic identity orientation.

“…(WAI) five times as they imagined themselves in the scene. The WAI inventory (Kuhn & McPartland, 1954) served as the primary measure of awareness of ethnicity following the procedure of Rhee, Uleman, Lee, and Roman (1995). In this approach, You are starting a new semester.…”

“…All other self-descriptions were classified as ethnicity unrelated. A total ethnic self-awareness score was determined using the procedure of Rhee et al (1995) that codes all discrete references to ethnicity in each of the five responses to the WAI as a percentage. Respondents' percentage ethnicity-related scores were used in all subsequent analyses to operationalize self-awareness of ethnicity.…”

Imagining the future: A cross-cultural perspective on possible selves

“…Rhee, Uleman, Lee and Roman (1995) examined self-descriptions (i.e., 'I am' statements) from participants in individualistic and collectivistic cultures. They found that participants who strongly identified as Asian Americans tended to generate a higher proportion of social, and lower proportion of autonomous, self-descriptions compared to European Americans.…”

“…It is commonly accepted that culture impacts on self-construal (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), influencing how we define ourselves (Rhee et al, 1995;Wang, 2001;2004) and how we remember our earliest (Wang, 2006) and most self-defining memories (Jobson & O'Kearney, 2008). In the field of autobiographical memory, it has been suggested that cultural life scripts organize the retrieval of memories across the lifespan, influencing the way people construct both their past (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004), and future (Berntsen & Bohn, 2010).…”

“…In the present study, we also examined whether the individualistic-collectivistic distinction would be demonstrated in possible selves by coding possible selves according to whether they were autonomous or social (e.g. Rhee et al, 1995). We chose to compare results from Turkey, the United Kingdom and Serbia as these groups differ on the collectivisticindividualistic continuum, with Turkey and Serbia both considered collectivistic, whilst the United Kingdom is classed as individualistic (Hofstede, 1980;Erdogan et al, 2008).…”