(Press-News.org) URBANA –Many young Jamaican immigrants are succeeding in the United States precisely because they remain strongly tied to Jamaican culture, said University of Illinois professor Gail M. Ferguson.
"Although many of these youths have forged a unique tricultural identity that draws from their Jamaican culture, African-American culture, and mainstream European American culture, the important factor in their academic and behavioral success is retaining strong ties to their Jamaican background," she said.
To learn how Jamaican immigrant teens were adjusting to life in their new country, the study surveyed 473 adolescent–mother dyads from Jamaican immigrant families in the United States, comparing their well-being with teens from families on the island and from white and black American families.
The researchers asked mothers and teens about the teens' culture, grades, behavior, friendships, home life, community involvement, and character traits.
"Overall, Jamaican immigrant teens were doing just as well as their American peers in terms of grades and positive behavior. Older immigrant teens, in particular, were actually doing a little better than Jamaican teens in the Caribbean," she said.
However, immigrant teens who had shed their Jamaican culture in favor of either or both American cultures had much lower grades and less positive behavior than those who had kept a strong ethnic affiliation, Ferguson said.
But the study also found that adapting to life in their new country could depend on affiliating, at least to some extent, with two American cultures. That's a new finding and an important piece of the puzzle, she said.
Why? "It shows us that identifying with certain subcultures can be important for success in school. And assimilation, depending on where immigrants are from and the subculture into which they are assimilating, can also be disadvantageous, as when Jamaican immigrant teens assimilate into a subculture that doesn't value education," she added.
Many black Jamaican immigrants naturally gravitate toward African-American culture, usually prompted by ethnic consumer needs such as getting their hair done or looking for a familiar worship experience. "Those connecting points are important to black immigrants' adjustment," she said.
Ferguson emphasized the importance of encouraging immigrants to retain some of their own cultural values and practices, including a strong priority on family and education because these are protective factors in their adjustment.
"Many immigrant teens who were doing well had the ability to gain things from both African-American and mainstream American cultures, then combine what they'd learned with their own strong attachment to Jamaican culture," she said.
Tridimensional Acculturation and Adaption Among Jamaican Adolescent–Mother Dyads in the United States appears in the September-October 2012 issue of Child Development. Co-authors are Gail Ferguson, formerly of Knox College, now a U of I professor; Marc H. Bornstein of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; and Audrey M. Pottinger of the University of the West Indies.
###
END
Proteins are able to self-assemble into a wide range of highly ordered structures that feature a diverse array of properties. Through biomimicry - technological innovation inspired by nature – humans hope to emulate proteins and produce our own version of self-assembling molecules. A key to accomplishing this is understanding how protein-folding – a process critical to the form and function of a protein – is extended from individual proteins to complex assemblies.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) ...
VIDEO:
This animation of satellite imagery shows the life of Hurricane Sandy from its development in the Caribbean Sea on Oct. 21, through its track up the US East coast and...
Click here for more information.
Hurricane Sandy is giving up the ghost on Halloween over Penn. As the storm weakened to a remnant low pressure area the NASA GOES Project released an animation of NOAA's GOES-13 satellite imagery covering Hurricane Sandy's entire life.
The GOES-13 satellite is managed ...
As Hurricane Sandy made a historic landfall on the New Jersey coast during the night of Oct. 29, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NASA/NOAA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite captured this night-time view of the storm. This image provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison is a composite of several satellite passes over North America taken 16 to18 hours before Sandy's landfall.
The storm was captured by a special "day-night band," which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering ...
The mineral properties of the aerosol particles and the wavelength distribution of incident light combine to determine whether a dust particle reflects radiation and cools the local atmosphere, absorbs radiation and warms the local atmosphere, or both. While scientists have a good handle on dust's primary effect of reflecting and cooling at the visible wavelengths, the smaller influence of absorbing and warming at the longer infrared wavelengths has remained more of an uncertainty – and most climate models either underestimate it or do not include it at all.
When the ...
Interventions designed to improve core deficits in children with autism spectrum disorders are supported by varying levels of evidence, highlighting the need for well-designed studies to better evaluate the interventions, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Researchers found that when they evaluated the past research on a wide variety of interventions aimed at improving core deficits in social/communication, language, behavior and adaptive skills, the evidence of efficacy ranged from moderate to insufficient. The findings are published in the November edition of ...
(Boston) - In the United States, the cost paid for statins (drugs to lower cholesterol) in people under the age of 65 who have private insurance continues to exceed comparable costs paid by the government in the United Kingdom (U.K.) by more than three fold. These results from Boston University's Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, are a follow up of an ongoing comparison of prescription drug costs between the U.S. and U.K. The initial results reported on relative drug costs in 2005. The current updated results for 2009 appear this week in the journal Pharmacotherapy. ...
People who undergo repeated surgeries to remove glioblastomas — the most aggressive and deadliest type of brain tumors — may survive longer than those who have just a one-time operation, new Johns Hopkins research suggests.
Glioblastoma, the brain cancer that killed Sen. Edward Kennedy, inevitably returns after tumor-removal surgery, chemotherapy, and/or radiation. The median survival time after diagnosis is only 14 months. With recurrence a near certainty, experts say, many have questioned the value of performing second, third or even fourth operations, especially given ...
Results of a Johns Hopkins study suggest that individuals with schizophrenia are significantly more likely to live longer if they take their antipsychotic drugs on schedule, avoid extremely high doses and also regularly see a mental health professional.
Psychiatrists have long known that people with schizophrenia who stick to a drug regimen have fewer of the debilitating delusions and hallucinations that are hallmarks of this illness. But there have been concerns about whether some of the known side effects of the medications — increased risk of cardiovascular disease ...
Understanding Workplace Sexual Harassment
No one should ever be subjected to a situation where they feel unsafe at work. Sexual harassment can have huge negative effects not only on individual workers, but on the workplace as a whole.
Understanding what sexual harassment is can go a long way toward making a workplace safer. Many employees don't take action to stop sexual harassment because they aren't fully aware of their rights. In other cases, a supervisor or coworker perpetrating the harassment may not even be aware that their conduct is both harmful and illegal.
What ...
EEOC: Workplace Discrimination Claims Hit Record High in 2011
The American workforce is getting more diverse, and that's a good thing. However, some employers have been slower than others to adapt to these changing demographics.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported a record-high number of workplace discrimination complaints last year. All told, the EEOC received almost 100,000 complaints in 2011.
The largest increase came from religious discrimination complaints, which were up 9.5 percent from ...
