Acculturation Essay

Understanding Acculturation
To fully comprehend the public health issue of poor mental health in Vietnamese immigrants in the United States, one must first understand the concept of acculturation. Recent studies of migrant health have posited that acculturation strongly influences health outcomes. Acculturation has been described by anthropologists since the early 1930’s as “those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous firsthand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups (Redfield, Linton, & Herskovitz, 1936, p. 149). Much of the public health research on immigrants focuses on the individual-level changes that occur with acculturation.

In other words, recent immigrants to the United States will experience a dip in their mental health, but will regain their mental health as the years go on. This model differs from the popular lifestyle model of acculturation, which implies a decline in physical health with acculturation. Interestingly, much of the research on this model of acculturation derives from studies of Hispanic immigrant populations in the United States, which potentially limits its applicability to other ethnic groups, such as Vietnamese immigrants (Salant & Lauderdale, 2003, p. 72). These theories provide the foundation for making sense of the data surrounding mental health in Vietnamese immigrant communities, and for understanding how post-migration factors play a role in depression and

The strong efforts at dispersion in the early resettlement period placed additional obstacles in the way of maintaining existing social relationships (Haines et al., 1981, p. 310). Shapiro et al. (1999) examined generational differences in psychosocial adaptation among Vietnamese immigrants to the U.S. and found that elderly immigrants encounter the greatest number of obstacles in mastering daily living skills such as new social customs and language acquisition. Middle-aged immigrants in the late 1990’s experienced the brunt of the trauma of the Vietnam war, and young adults felt they were caught between two cultures, and experienced chronic cultural conflict leading to mental distress (p.