Relationship between Ethnic Identification and Acculturation Attitudes of Immigrants with Level of Their Socio-Economic Adaptation

This article describes the construction and testing of theoretical model of socio-economic adaptation (SEA) of immigrants considering psychological factors as the basic ones. In the analysis of previous studies acculturation attitudes of immigrants were identified as key psychological factors of SEA for the construction of the theoretical model; length of stay in the country and language skills were used as control variables; the characteristics of ethnic identity were used as predictors of acculturation attitudes. We carried out the survey of Russian-speaking immigrants in Belgium for verification of our model. Next we used path analysis for test¬ing of the model on the data obtained. According to the study, we found that (1) acculturation attitudes of immigrants associated to their level of SEA themselves regardless of length of stay in the country and their lan¬guage skills; (2) high level of SEA of immigrants is positively associated with orientation to the host society (integration and assimilation), and negative associated with orientation to their ethnic group (separation); (3) strong ethnic identification may facilitate the orientation of immigrants to their ethnic group and prevent assimilation.

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