The Immigrant Paradox: Acculturation and Developmental Outcomes – Hardcover

This book addresses the proposition that less acculturated immigrants fare better than their more acculturated peers despite facing substantial adversity. It draws on five meta-analyses and a broader body of research spanning three decades to examine evidence across education, mental health, risk behaviors, civic engagement, and suicide-related outcomes. It identifies the ways in which the evidence supports and challenges the paradox and how the findings depend on the populations, contexts, and measures studied. The book is grounded in an integrative risk and resilience framework, and it describes how relationships between acculturation and development vary by demographic background, contextual factors, and research methods. In addition, it discusses how the measurement of acculturation shapes the findings and their interpretation, offering implications for research, practice, and policy.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Acculturation and academic achievement among immigrant-origin students.
• Mental health, acculturative stress, and risk and resilience.
• Risk behaviors and the protective role of heritage culture.
• Civic engagement among immigrant-origin youth and adults.
• Suicidal ideation and other suicide-related outcomes.
• Measurement of acculturation and its implications for understanding the immigrant paradox.

The Immigrant Paradox is an essential resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians, practitioners, and policymakers in developmental, social, and cross-cultural psychology, family studies, social work, public health, migration studies, political science, and all interrelated disciplines.