A Multidimensional Framework for Examining Racial Identity across Different Biracial Groups

A Multidimensional Framework for Examining Racial Identity across Different Biracial Groups

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Evelina Lou
York University

Richard N. Lalonde
York University

Carlos Wilson
York University

Recent research has adopted a multidimensional view initially proposed by Rockquemore and colleagues (2002, 2009) for examining racial identity among Black/White biracials. This approach has acknowledged the social construction of and has widened the range of racial identity options beyond the two “traditional” options of “Black” or “biracial.” This study was designed to further assess this framework by examining a more diverse multiracial sample from Canada and the U.S. (N = 122). Results indicated that similar to Black/White biracials (n = 38), Asian/White biracials (n = 40) showed great variability in their selection of Rockquemore’s biracial identity categories, but the pattern of responses differed across the two groups. Specifically, Asian/White individuals were most likely to have a protean identity (i.e., sometimes Asian, sometimes White, and sometimes biracial), whereas Black/White individuals were most likely to have an exclusively biracial identity that they perceived as either validated or unvalidated by other people. In addition, variations in racial identity were in line with cognitive measures of self-concept clarity (SCC) and bicultural identity integration (BII), such that individuals with a validated biracial identity scored higher on SCC and BII than those with a protean or an unvalidated biracial identity. These findings suggest that having a clearly-defined, stable, and integrated bicultural self-concept is associated with the extent to which individuals’ biracial identity is validated by others in their social network. Theoretical implications for extending Rockquemore’s model to other biracial groups are discussed.

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