ABSTRACT
Academic enquiry into the phenomenon of cross-cultural adaptation has been vast and varied across social science disciplines. This field of study became formalized in the 1930s when the Social Science Research Council adopted the term ‘acculturation’ to represent the new enquiry in cultural anthropology. The Council provided the parameters for this new field, which dealt with ‘those phenomena which result when groups of individuals have different cultures and come into first-hand contact with subsequent changes in the original pattern of either or both groups’
(Redfield et al. 1936: 149). Accordingly, anthropologists such as Herskovits (1958) have approached the acculturation phenomenon largely at the level of cultural groups, focusing on the dynamics of change in traditional cultures and the presence of kin, friends and social organizations within immigrant communities. Sociologists, likewise, have focused on group-level issues pertaining to the structural ‘assimilation’ of immigrant groups within and across generations, employing indicators such as intermarriage and socioeconomic status (e.g. Anderson and Saenz 1994). Paralleling the macro-level approaches to cross-cultural adaptation are a wide range of
individual-level approaches employed by researchers mainly in psychology and communication. Major developments in the micro-level studies of long-term and short-term cross-cultural adaptation are briefly described below, along with a number of more notable theoretical accounts thereof.
