Acculturation and Psychological Adjustment of Vietnamese Immigrants in the United States

Acculturation to the new, host culture and acculturation to heritage culture have been shown to impact immigrants’ adjustment during the years following resettlement. While acculturation has been noted as an important factor in adaptation of Vietnamese immigrants (Birman & Tran, 2008), specific findings of the relationship between acculturation and psychological adjustment within this population have been inconsistent. These inconsistencies may be a result of two issues in the acculturation field today: measuring acculturation using unilinear or forced-choice rather than bilinear scales, and failure to use a life domains approach. The purpose of this paper is to contextualize the study of acculturation and adjustment by taking an ecological approach to exploring these relationships across several life domains, using a bilinear scale (Birman & Trickett, 2001), and examining mediators of these relationships for adult Vietnamese male and female immigrants in the United States. Results of a structural equation model (SEM) showed that job satisfaction fully mediated the relationship between American acculturation and psychological distress and that job satisfaction was predicted by both American and Vietnamese acculturation. Implications for a life domains approach, including domain specificity, are discussed.