Working with African immigrant families: Towards emic research and self-rediscovery

Aïcha Cissé, M.A.

Fordham University
 

When he fled a raging dictatorship in his native country, Guinea in West Africa, my father was just over eighteen. Similar to many immigrants' experiences, the trip to and settlement in Europe was filled with hardship and misfortunes, yet it also reflected resilience, hope, and aspirations. Around the same time, my mother left her native village in Switzerland. She fled not a dictatorship, but a patriarchal community where women were expected to marry fellow local farmers and follow their mothers' footsteps into homemaking. My grandparents' disagreement with my mother's choice to live in a city as a single woman went up a notch, into full-blown outrage actually, when she announced that she was marrying an African asylum seeker. My grandparents had never even seen a Black person and knew little about the Muslim religion, except that it prohibits against consuming pork and alcohol. For my grandfather, a pork breeder who prided himself for brewing his own shnapps (a traditional Swiss liquor), my mother's choice of husband was not only incomprehensible but also a personal blow. Notwithstanding, when I was a few months old my parents brought me to the village unannounced, hoping that my grandparents would accept seeing their grandchild and bury the hatchet. As soon as he laid eyes on me, my grandfather snatched me away from my mother's arms and took me around the village to show everybody how beautiful his granddaughter was.

Growing up, my parents cultivated each other's cultural differences in ways that allowed me not only to develop a multicultural identity, but also sparked my lifelong interest in cultural diversity. My personal and academic aspirations eventually led me to cultural psychology, a field in which I had the opportunity to study how culture and society influence psychosocial development, identity formation, and family relations. As a graduate student in clinical psychology, I currently work in Dr. Rasmussen's Culture, Migration, and Community research lab at Fordham University, where we conduct research with African and other non-Western immigrant populations. The path to finding my niche as a scholar has been paved with disappointment and even contempt towards traditional universalist, deficit-oriented approaches to studying culturally diverse immigrant populations. It only takes a few literature reviews on the topic to realize that many well-accepted theoretical frameworks and methodological tools used to study cultural diversity are in fact culturally insensitive. Similar to a growing number of scholars who share this view, the two research projects I conducted over the past three years reflect a reaction against mainstream psychology research involving non-Western populations.

The research project I conducted for my master's thesis was a qualitative study of parent-child acculturation dissonance among six West African immigrant families. Parent-child acculturation dissonance refers to differential levels of acculturation between parents and their children, which, according to traditional frameworks (e.g., parent-child acculturation gap-distress model), leads to negative outcomes such as family conflict and youth maladjustment. Based on my own experiences and observations growing up in a bicultural family context and African immigrant community, I doubted these assumptions and searched for alternative frameworks. I soon found that, although well-accepted, traditional frameworks are not empirically supported, as they were based solely on research conducted with clinical samples. Research involving clinical samples typically reflects deficit-oriented approaches focusing mainly on negative outcomes (e.g., immigrant youths exhibiting problem behavior). Research conducted with community samples showed that, in most cases, parent-child acculturation dissonance was not associated with negative individual or family outcomes. These findings were in turn supported by my study results, which highlighted the overall presence of positive and stable parent-child relations and healthy psychosocial development in adolescents, despite the presence of some level of parent-child acculturation-dissonance.

Another important finding was that parent-child acculturation dissonance, and its impact on family relations and youth development, are negotiated through culture-specific family processes. Namely, results suggested that, among Muslim African immigrant families, cultural transmission and maintenance of traditional African family values, adaptive and flexible parenting, and the development of a bicultural identity in youths promote family cohesion and youth adjustment, while also buffering against the potential negative impact of parent-child acculturation dissonance. This underscores the importance of taking an emic approach (i.e., reflecting the perspective of the specific culture of interest) when studying culturally diverse populations. In the U.S., the majority of studies on acculturation and related factors were conducted with Asian and Latino populations, and the resulting frameworks are often applied to other immigrant groups without regard for potential ethnocultural differences (i.e., the universalist approach). My findings point to the need for research and clinical practice involving non-Western immigrant families to consider the important role that culture-specific normative value systems play in child psychosocial development, parenting, and family relations.

The second research project I conducted[1] was a qualitative study of sources of resilience and family coping among West African refugee families who experienced pre- and post-migration trauma and adversity. Here again, traditional trauma literature represents Western paradigms and frames of reference, which are too often imposed on non-Western populations without regard for potential cross-cultural differences in the meaning-making of trauma and related factors. Although post-traumatic psychopathological responses have been observed cross-culturally, variations were found in type of responses and conceptualization of trauma. Because trauma is a Western construct, its conceptualization (e.g., ICD and DSM criteria for PTSD) may not reflect non-Western frames of references for understanding, defining (e.g., local idioms of distress), coping with and healing trauma. Furthermore, traditional trauma research not only takes an etic approach but is also primarily deficit-oriented. In reaction to this, a growing body of research has shifted the focus on resilience and family coping. This line of research informed the narrative inquiry of twenty-four in depth interviews with our eight participant-families.

Participants’ migration narratives did not reflect traditional trauma and adversity models, which contend that individuals who experienced trauma or adversity are more vulnerable to subsequent stressors and are at greater risk for negative individual and family outcomes. Rather than increased spousal conflict, narratives reflected stability, cooperation, and support. Rather than family dysfunction, narratives reflected coherence, cohesion, and non-conflicted parent-child relations. Rather than less effective parenting, narratives reflected consistency, active supervision and monitoring, and control over children's behavior. Rather than depressive or anxiety symptoms causing ineffective parenting, participants exhibited agency in their ability to provide for their children and actively protect them from perceived negative influences. What these results suggest is not that participants did not experience trauma-related psychological disturbances, as some were referred by a mental health clinic, but rather that the presence of trauma-related symptoms does not necessarily imply impaired capacity to function appropriately in major life domains (e.g., family context).

Moreover, our results indicate that, among West African refugee populations, culturally-shaped sources of resilience such as cultural continuity, collectivism, religiosity, adaptive flexibility, and downward comparison constitute sociocultural protective factors that may buffer against the negative impacts of pre- and post-migration trauma and adversity. Culturally-shaped sources of resilience have received little attention in the empirical literature and are often ignored in clinical practice, as most models informing intervention and treatment favor biomedical, etic approaches to trauma-related psychopathology. However, identifying culturally-shaped sources of resilience may lead to more culturally sensitive, and more effective, approaches to psychological healing among non-Western immigrant clients.

The two studies described above challenge well-accepted theoretical frameworks and assumptions regarding the lived-experiences of African and other non-Western immigrant populations. Drawing from my own experiences and observations in culturally diverse contexts, along with being an immigrant in the U.S., my research goal was to take a truly emic approach in order for my findings to reflect participants' own meaning-makings. This line of research also led to a rediscovery of my own psychosocial and multicultural identity development. I believe that promoting cultural diversity is about investigating differences, not just similarities. Cross-cultural research is often limited in that it merely tests whether Western theories and constructs apply to ethnoculturally diverse populations, rather than being interested in culture-specific psychosocial factors. This inherently ethnocentric approach is unlikely to capture the very essence and richness of diverse cultures. 

* I will be presenting this research project at the 2019 SPSSI conference in San Diego.

Key words: African immigrant families, parent-child acculturation dissonance, emic, trauma, refugee populations, resilience, family coping

Email: acisse3@fordham.edu

back to menu