Measuring Cultural Socialization: Su Yeong Kim’s Scale for Understanding Family and Peer Influence

When Culture Shapes Adolescents

Culture is a major constituent of the way youths get to know who they are, where they fit in, and how they manage to prosper in life. This does not go smoothly in the case of adolescents in immigrant and minority families. Their role is frequently to juggle the demands of mainstream society, high school peers, and their heritage at home.

Although the issue of parents imparting cultural values to their children has been studied extensively over the years, what has not been addressed very well is the role of peers. Most teenagers spend a lot of their time with peers, friends, and peer groups who significantly shape the way teens negotiate between their heritage and mainstream cultures.

To fill this void, this study by Yijie Wang, Aprile D. Benner, and Su Yeong Kim, published in Psychological Assessment, came up with the Cultural Socialization Scale (CSS), which is a new instrument that is aimed at evaluating the socialization of adolescents to heritage and mainstream traditions by the family as well as their peers. This research study offers a multidimensional and valid measure, which broadens the understanding of cultural development.

Socialization As An Important Link: Su Yeong Kim’s Insights on Why It Works For Adolescents

The family serves as a major source of cultural socialization, which is often the strongest. Parents transmit history, language, and identity values through daily practices, traditions, and conversations. Adolescence is also a period when peer pressure is particularly extreme. Friends present new behaviors and influence group membership as well as modeling mainstream culture.

Compared to previous studies, which were limited, this research points to the fact that cultural socialization is multidimensional and transactional, as carried out by parents. Teenagers do not just get educated on the history of their origins. They also actively get to learn where they are by way of interacting with peers and mainstream institutions.

To describe this two-fold process, the Cultural Socialization Scale examines four major areas:

1. Family to Heritage culture
2. Family to Mainstream culture
3. Peers to Heritage culture, and,
4. Peers to Mainstream culture

How Socialization Shapes Youth: Major Findings Curated From Su Yeong Kim’s Study

The creation as well as the testing of the Cultural Socialization Scale provided several valuable insights into the methods of cultural learning:

• The Persistence of Family Socialization: Families are still robust carriers of heritage traditions. Some of the values that parents stress include respect for the elders, family responsibility, and cultural pride. The practices help these adolescents tie themselves down to their heritage identity, though they are accustomed to mainstream society.

• The Rising Role of Peers: The peers became particularly prominent in mainstream socialization. Friendship was one of the main sources that helped adolescents learn about American customs, social norms, and expectations. Simultaneously, peers also contributed to the preservation of the heritage culture by sharing language, food, and community life.

• Intersection of Mainstream and Heritage Socialization: Cultural learning does not happen as either-or. At the same time, heritage and mainstream influences tend to interact in adolescents. As an example, a student could not only enjoy a heritage holiday at home but also find out how to cope with American high school culture, together with friends.

• Overt and Covert Practices: The scale measured explicit teaching (overt activities such as teaching history or values) and implicit modeling (covert activities such as eating cultural foods or visiting cultural events). These two types of learning were crucial to identity formation.

Mediating Factors: Family and Peers

The relationships between cultural socialization and the outcomes of adolescence are usually indirect and influenced by family and peer-related factors.

1. Parenting Behaviors: Warmth, involvement, and consistency in parenting enhance the beneficial impacts of heritage socialization and reaffirming pride and resilience.
2. Peer Relationships: Positive peer groups enhance the advantages of cultural socialization, and negative or ostracizing peer experiences may exacerbate stress.
3. Identity Development: Bicultural competence is reported to be higher among adolescents who have been socialized by both families and peers in a balanced manner, and this facilitates their academic and psychological adaptation.

Although most of the cultural socialization is socially positive, the impact can be different due to moderate factors:

1. Economic Stress: Families that are economically strained might have limited resources to participate in cultural practices, which restricts the intensity of passing on the heritage.
2. School Environments: Diversity in schools encourages heritage sharing, and less diversity might point towards mainstream adaptation.
3. Gender Differences: Boys and girls do not always get the same cultural messages, although girls are more frequently encouraged to perpetuate traditional roles, and boys are more often pushed into mainstream independence.

Implications Of The Study

The implications of this research study can be outlined as follows for practitioners who work with diverse youth groups:

• Look Beyond Family Alone: The issue of cultural development among adolescents should be understood in terms of the dual interaction of families and peers.

• Appreciate Bicultural Strengths: Those teens who are able to combine heritage and mainstream cultures have better identity and resilience. The development of bicultural competence should be a nurturing strength rather than a battle in programs.

• Support Peer Contexts: The effects of cultural socialization can be increased by schools and community interventions that promote cultural pride and inclusive peer relations.

• Design Context-Sensitive Interventions: Peer influence should also be considered in family-based programs that should be based on the actual social settings of teens.

Moving Forward: Measuring What Matters in Cultural Development

The Cultural Socialization Scale is not a study instrument. It is a change in the perception of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers who think about the development of adolescents in multicultural settings. The scale offers a more detailed insight into identity formation through the integration of heritage and mainstream forces by recording the voices of the family and peers.

The research highlights the fact that cultural development is not a linear and one-dimensional process. It is an overlay process that is occurring in the relations and environments. This process may be a resilience and a challenge to immigrant and minority youth. Using the Cultural Socialization Scale, researchers and practitioners can now assess and justify this complexity, so that cultural identity can be understood as the key to adolescent well-being.

Study Full Research

This article is based on The Cultural Socialization Scale: Assessing Family and Peer Socialization Toward Heritage and Mainstream Cultures by Yijie Wang, Aprile D. Benner, and Su Yeong Kim, published in Psychological Assessment (2015).

Learn More

For further resources, visit: researchsummary.suyeongkim.com