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Adolescents’ future wishes and fears in their acculturation process
International Journal of Intercultural Relations 35 (2011) 1–8
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Adolescents’ future wishes and fears in their acculturation process Elena Briones a,∗ , Carmen Tabernero b,1 , Alicia Arenas c,2 a b c
The European Research Center on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER), The Netherlands University of Cordoba, Department of Psychology, Avenida San Alberto Magno, sn. 14004 – Córdoba University of Sevilla, Department of Social Psychology, C/ Camilo Jose Cela, sn. 41018 – Sevilla
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Accepted 8 June 2010 Keywords: Wishes Fears Adolescents Cultural origin Acculturation
a b s t r a c t In this study we aim at learning about adolescents’ future fears and wishes from different cultural origins with a view to finding implications for intervention in the furthering of their satisfaction and social integration in their acculturation process. The study sample comprised 938 secondary school students—64.4% Spanish, 19.7% South American and 12.8% African. Wishes and fears were evaluated by means of two open questions and the answers were categorized following traditional content analysis methodology. Results show that the adolescents wish for a satisfactory job, family and economic situation, and that they are concerned about aspects such as their own health and that of their family, the possibility of having a precarious job, isolation from their family of origin, and not forming a family. The findings also allow us to give differential profiles according to the cultural origin of the adolescents. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Studying the wishes and fears expressed by adolescents gives us knowledge of the nature and level of their emotional adjustment (Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937). Thus, the object of a wish or fear can be seen as the product of how one expresses oneself (Guarnaccia & Vane, 1979). Wishes and fears have been integrated in possible selves concept in order to indicate those elements of the self-concept that represent what we would like to become and what we are afraid of becoming (Cross & Markus, 1991; Markus & Nurius, 1986). Wishes have been defined as objectives that are not restricted to the limitations of the real world (Ehrlichman & Eischenstein, 1992; Heckhausen & Kulh, 1985). Wishes are also considered to be indicators of implicit motivation (King, 1995), since they are characterized by being unconscious, primitive, automatic and intimately related to emotion. Likewise, it is maintained that they come from natural, universal incentives and from the early experiences of childhood (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1992). Moreover, fears or concerns have been defined as a subtype of anxiety that serves as an indicator of poor mental health (Davey & Tallis, 1994; Eysenck, 1992). Thus, Boehnke, Schwartz, Stromberg, and Sagiv (1998) distinguish between two kinds of concern in relation to the object which has its security threatened. “Micro” concerns have as an object the self or those with whom there is an intimate relationship (in-group or extensions of the self). “Macro” concerns have as object entities external to the self, i.e., society, the world or the universe. It has been shown that “micro” concerns (e.g., my parents may die) are strongly related to cognitive and affective indices of poor mental health, whereas “macro” concerns (e.g., unemployment in my country) are not related to mental health and can even show a positive relationship with well-being (Boehnke, 1995; Doctor, Goldenring, & Powell, 1987; Griffin & Prior, 1990).
∗ Corresponding author at: ERCOMER, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31 30 253 7987; fax: +31 30 253 4733. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (E. Briones), [email protected] (C. Tabernero), [email protected] (A. Arenas). 1 Tel.: +34 957 212535; fax: +34 957 218937. 2 Tel.: +34 635 628987; fax: +34 954 557711. 0147-1767/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijintrel.2010.06.003
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The study about wishes is also very interesting, since Markus and colleagues (Cross & Markus, 1991; Markus & Nurius, 1986) suggest that much of our significant behavior can be seen primarily as an effort to approach or avoid various possible selves. These possible selves of teens include expectations and concerns about how one will do in school, how one will fit in socially, and how to get through adolescence without becoming off-track—pregnant, arrested, or hooked on drugs (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006). According to Heckhausen and Kulh (1985), wishes are the first step on the long road that leads to action. These authors present a model that describes how wishes are developed and become intentions, and how these intentions become actions. Given that these early volitional orientations are expressed as processes of self-regulation that lead to action (Kulh, 2000) and that the content, both of wishes and fears, is linked to emotions and mental health (Davey & Tallis, 1994; Eysenck, 1992; King, 1995), we consider it necessary to go deeper into the nature of wishes and fears, in order to obtain implications as to how adolescents can be helped to achieve their life objectives and overcome their fears. Nowadays, adolescents could need more than before this intervention because the growing cultural diversity in the school, usually about immigration, makes adolescents mix frequently with students from other ethnic and cultural origins, and consequently they experience acculturation, i.e., important psychological and cultural changes (Berry, 1992). A review of the literature on adolescents’ wishes and fears shows few studies in which a comparable interest is given to wishes and fears (Cross & Markus, 1991; Markus & Nurius, 1986; Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937); most studies are confined to wishes. However, with regard to fears, from 20 years ago a number of studies dealt with fears of nuclear war (Solantaus, Rimpelä, & Taipale, 1984) and the differences of children’s fears between countries (Solantaus, 1987; Tarifa & Kloep, 1996). In this article, in order to summarize progress on these two concepts, we opted for condensing the contributions made from different research lines. Scientific studies carried out on adolescents’ wishes and fears have mainly focused on deciphering and classifying their thematic content. Thus we encounter various categorical systems that, with more or less detail, reflect the subject matter of wishes and fears. The studies carried out by Vandewiele (1980, 1981) summarized the wishes of students’ aged between 13 and 21 in seven categories: possessions and activities, money, vocation, physical and psychological benefits (e.g., personal appearance, intelligence), social relations (e.g., having a child, that my parents should never die), getting married or having a lover and altruistic wishes (e.g., benefits for the family, friends and others). King (1995) carried out a more summarized classification, encoding the wishes of students aged between 18 and 25 in the following three categories: achievement (which includes aspects of the type “to be successful in my career”, “to have musical talent”), affiliation (e.g., to have more friends, to fall in love and get married), and power (e.g., to be the king of the universe, to have control over everything). It is also interesting to bear in mind that Boehnke et al. (1998) posed that each fear refers to a particular domain in life. Thus, Boehnke, Schwartz and their colleagues (Boehnke et al., 1998; Schwartz, Sagiv, & Boehnke, 2000) consider that the different instruments used for measuring fears coincide in contemplating seven domains: health, safety, environment, social relations, meaning of life, achievement at work and in studies, and economy. Then, the categorical systems on the content of adolescents’ wishes and fears show a high degree of similarity. By comparative analysis of the results of the studies reviewed (King, 1995; Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937; Solantaus et al., 1984; Vandewiele, 1980, 1981) we detected how widely spread certain wishes and fears are. That is, adolescents tend to indicate the same principal wishes and fears. The wishes about vocational aspects are usually high on the list, followed by the wish for personal fulfilment and other expectations of a more altruistic type, such as wishing welfare for other people (Vandewiele, 1981). As regards the prevalence of concerns, aspects such as fear of war and death reached first place in the studies by Pintner and Brunschwig (1937), and Solantaus et al. (1984). These results reflect a high degree of social awareness in adolescents as to the concerns present at the socio-historical moment in which the studies were carried out, since, as we noticed, these authors obtained their results during the period prior to the Second World War (Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937) or during the threat of nuclear war (Solantaus et al., 1984). In this sense, Oyserman and Fryberg (2006) and Oyserman and Markus (1993) maintained possible selves are shaped by social context. Adolescents learn about what is possible and what is valued through engagement with their social context. In this way, social contexts provide important feedback to adolescents about whether a possible self is positively or negatively valued and can shift the perceived likelihood that an expected or feared possible self is likely. Thus, acculturation experience could give them new issues that they could consider to build their own future wishes and fears. Positive or wished, expected selves, and feared or avoided selves are often studied separately (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006). But wishes and fears can be studied in conjunction. In this sense, balance refers to the construal of both positive expectations and fears in the same domain. Youth with balanced possible selves have both a positive self-identifying goal to strive for and are aware of the personally relevant consequences of not meeting that goal. This balance may preserve motivation to attain the positive possible self and therefore avoid the negative self, leading these youths to make more attempts to attain expected selves and avoid feared ones. Only strategies that simultaneously increase the possibility of attaining the positive self and avoiding the negative self will be attempted (Oyserman & Markus, 1990). Hence, taking in mind the literature aforementioned, the first objective of this study is to identify the main wishes and fears of a multicultural sample of adolescents. In addition, we aim to analyze the balance of them in the same domain and their relative frequency because of the important implications for psychosocial development of adolescents. We underline cultural origin as a variable capable of generating differences in adolescents’ future expectations. Vandewiele (1980, 1981) thus showed differences in the prevalence of wishes between Senegalese adolescents and the Australian adolescents, with the Senegalese students showing greater interest in wishes referring to professional vocation.
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Moreover, the categories presented in these studies (Vandewiele, 1980, 1981) comprise new subject matter relating to culture-religion, such as the wish “to visit Mecca with my family”, not contemplated in studies in which other cultural groups were considered. In fact, Oyserman and Fryberg (2006) emphasized that the focus on possible selves (hopes and fears) of minority youths is needed, because these mediate between values and actual behavior. If we understand possible selves are socially constituted and maintained, it is likely that ethnic groups differ systematically in their possible selves. Then, to study possible selves of ethnic minority youth allow us to gain better understanding of the motivational world of these youths (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006, p. 8). Moreover, the cultural characteristics of the group the adolescents belong to affect the content and prevalence of their wishes and fears, since, as some authors point out (Triandis, McCusker, & Hui, 1990), these peculiarities of the group influence the cognitive thought of its members. For instance, in individualist cultures personal goals are sought, goals which reflect individual wishes and needs, whereas in collectivist cultures the goals usually pursued are communal, reflecting the wishes and needs of the members of the group (Schwartz et al., 2000). In this line, Ben – Ari & Lavee (2004) showed that the members of collectivist cultures indicate the family as the main source of concern. Also, their goals and wishes usually reflect the needs of their community rather than their personal needs as occurs in individualist cultures. Nevertheless, Sedikides, Gaertner, and Toguchi (2003) find that the wish for personal development is a universal motive. Given the impact of group culture and the growing cultural diversity of the adolescent population in our country, here our second objective is to analyze whether their hopes and fears will vary according to their cultural origin, and also according the status of the group, mainstream or minority group. We study the groups more representative (South American, African, and Spaniard) in the acculturation process experience by the adolescents in Spain. Another outstanding aspect in the studies carried out on adolescents’ wishes is the effect of gender. In the different decades in which studies of this type were made the effect of differentiation between boys and girls in specific wishes has been corroborated. That is, boys show greater interest in achieving personal development and in material aspects, whereas girls are more interested in family and social relations (Ables, 1972; Guarnaccia & Vane, 1979; Karnes & Wherry, 1981; King, 1995; Vandewiele, 1980, 1981). These authors suggest that this is a reflection of the early assuming of the gender roles present in society. Hence, boys take on the masculine, breadwinner role and girls a more dependent orientation. Thus, cultural pressure affects personal development in the direction of the divergence of gender roles. Oyserman and Fryberg (2006) maintained that gender differences may occur due to differences in cognitive and social development. In adolescence, girls are faster to develop self-awareness, self-reflection and abstract reasoning; their self-concepts contain more relational content, and by mid-adolescence, they are more likely to begin thinking about the integration of future work and family roles. These differences imply first, that possible selves will have less self-regulatory power for boys than for girls and second, that girls are less likely to develop strictly task-focused possible selves and will attempt to juggle more numerous possible selves connecting the self to others. In view of the arguments given above, our third objective aimed to analyze the differentiation of adolescents’ interests and concerns according to gender. In short, the objectives of this study are to extract the subject matter and the prevalence of adolescents’ wishes and fears, as well as analyze the relationship of both aspects with cultural origin and gender. We shall tackle these objectives following a mixed (qualitative and quantitative) methodology which is set out below. 1. Method 1.1. Sample selection criteria In order to guarantee that the sample was living an acculturation process, statistics published by the Spanish Ministry of Education for 2007–2008 were used as a reference, relating to the adolescent immigrants distribution in Spain by Autonomous Region and province. Madrid and Andalusia are home to the greatest number of immigrant students in which the Spanish is the only one official language. Within Andalusia, the province of Almeria has the highest number of immigrants and the greatest symmetry in terms of the students’ origin (35.03% Africans and 21.69% South Americans). Hence, three secondary schools were chosen at random from Madrid and another three from Almeria, in which the percentage of immigrant students was over 50% of the total to guarantee the same level of intercultural contact with students from mainstream society. The neighbourhoods were characterized by high concentrations of South American and African migrant families of a medium–low social class. 1.2. Sample The sample was formed by 938 students from Compulsory Secondary Education. The ages of the participants ranged from 12 to 18 (M = 14.19 years, SD = 1.46). Of these, 46.8% were female and 53.2% male. According to their cultural selfcategorization, and also their place of birth, 64.4% were Spanish, 22.8% South American and 12.8% African. The immigrant students had been living in Spain for an average of 3.72 years (SD = 2.28). The three groups did not differ in gender, but Spanish students were a little younger (M = 13.98 years, SD = 1.37) than South American students (M = 14.53 years, SD = 1.48, t(238) = 2.95, p < .01). South American and African students and their parents were fist generation immigrants and none of them was born in Spain. Their age of arrival in Spain was 7.05 years (SD = 5.47) and the two groups did not differ in this variable (t(234) = 1.85, p > .10). The qualitative analysis was carried out with the sample constituted by 938 students. However, since
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the samples had very different sizes and it could affect the homogeneity of variances assumption, the MANOVA with cultural origin and gender factors were carried out with a reduced sample randomly, in this way every cultural group was integrated by 120 students.
1.3. Variables and measurements Cultural self-categorization. The identification with the own cultural group was measured by one question in which the participant informed about their familiar culture between six options (Spanish, Gypsy, African, European, Asian, and South American), and also, an open option was offered. In this study was only considered the adolescents who answered Spanish, African or South American. Wishes and fears were measured by two open questions from the adaptation of the School Health Behavior Inventory (Wold, 1995), translated into Spanish by Balaguer (2002). The questions were: “when you think about your life and the future in general, which are the three things you most wish for in the future?” and “which are the three things you most fear in the future?” In order to analyze the participants’ answers a system of categories was created from the traditional content analysis methodology (Bardin, 1996; Tesch, 1990), based on the suppositions of the Grounded Theory (Henwood & Pidgeon, 2003). Grounded Theory involves a constant two-way dialectical process or “flip-flop” between data and the researcher’s conceptualizations. In this sense we consider existing typology and we try to take the emerging from data, following the first phase of this Grounded Theory: “open-coding to capture the detail, variation, and complexity of the basic qualitative material” (Henwood & Pidgeon, 2003, p. 136). This kind of iterative method to detecting the regularities allowed us to develop a system of categories (Henwood & Pidgeon, 2003), with in turn were grouped thematically and functionally in an articulated global system because of in this analysis was detected that answer content of wishes and fears were similar, then we created the same categories for wishes and fears. Once categories were built and defined we encoded the 10% of the cases for testing the exhaustive and exclusive features of the categories. As a result of this process the 11 categories applicable to the wishes and fears we give in Table 1 were formulated.
Table 1 Categories relating to adolescents’ future wishes and fears, and means and SD of their relative frequency. Label
Definition
Examples: wishes/fears
Mean: wishes/fears
SD: wishes/fears
Maintaining roots
Statements that reflect interest in returning to or visiting their own country of origin or that of their parents. Interest and concern for studies and training. Aspects relating to the students’ occupational and professional future. Comments that reflect the perception of economic, physical and personal security. Interest and concern for social welfare, ecology, distribution of wealth, peace, public safety, etc. Interest and concern for achieving dreams about what they want to be and do in the future. Fear of physical illness, pain and dying; and a wish to enjoy good health (at a self-referential level and at the level of personal surroundings). Aspects relating to the creation and maintenance of relations with friends, family or partner. Expectations and fears relating to forming a family or maintaining that of origin. Fear of having bad luck and a wish to be lucky in life. Interest and concern not coinciding with any of the previous categories.
“To get to know my parents’ country”/“Never going back to my country”
.03/.03
.11/.13
“To study and graduate in Law”/“To repeat a year” “To work in something that I like”/“Not having a decent job”
.07/.05
.16/.15
.29/.13
.29/.21
“To have a house of my own”/“Not having enough money to buy my things” “To help people in need”/“Corrupt policies”
.12/.07
.20/.16
.02/.09
.12/.23
“To be happy”/“To fail”
.14/.12
.23/.23
“To have good health”/“To suffer illness”
.05/.20
.14/.27
“To have more friends”/“Not being able to trust anybody”
.07/.12
.15/.22
“To get married and adopt children”/“To be separated from my family” “To be lucky”/“To have an accident” “To have a pet”/“that there won’t be any flying cars”
.18/.13
.23/.22
.01/.04
.04/.13
.01/.03
.09/.13
Training Work
Economic welfare
Altruism or social interests
Personal fulfilment
Illness, health and death
Personal relations
Family
Luck or misfortune Others
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The encoding of the answers was independently carried out by two research assistants, who were not familiar with the study objectives, and who received prior instruction in the definitions of the categories. The inter-judge reliability calculated by Kappa concordance coefficient reached scores that range between .87 and .95, therefore agreement between the judges was almost perfect (Viera & Garrett, 2005). Finally, disagreements were solved by consensus. Each wish or fear is taken as a unit as in other studies (e.g., King, 1995). Then, data analysis was performed with the 22 variables – 11 referring to wishes and another 11 to fears – created with the relative frequency of appearance of each category (i.e., score ranges between 0 and 1) since there were adolescents who did not reported wishes and fears in the three options of answer. 2. Results 2.1. Future wishes and fears prevalence and relations between them in the same domain We performed paired-samples t-test between all pairs of wishes in order to establish their significant prevalence. In order to summarize a large of information about these analyses, here is only described the ranged of significant t values (df = 244, means and SD can be seen in Table 1). Results showed that students expressed wishes referring to work in more extend than other wishes, since the comparison of this category with all others categories were significant (p < .001) and t values ranged from 4.32 for the paired categories of work and family, to 15.25 for the paired categories of work and luck. In second place, we found family, personal fulfilment and economic welfare as future wishes; their t values ranged from 3.20 (p < .01) for the paired categories of economic welfare and relations, to 11.58 (p < .001) for the paired categories of family and luck. Followed we had the wish to have satisfactory personal relations, continue their studies, and enjoy good health; in this case their t values ranged from −2.14 (p < .05) for the paired wishes of roots and health, to −9.67 (p < .001) for training and work paired of categories. Wishes relating to altruism or interests of a social nature, keeping in touch with one’s roots, and other types of wishes category were in fourth place; and their paired-samples t-test values ranged from 2.09 (p < .05) for the paired categories of altruism and luck, to −12.85 (p < .001) for roots and work. Finally, luck was that less outstanding in the set of students who took part in the study; comparisons of this category with all other categories were significant and t values ranged from 2.96 (p < .05) for the paired categories of roots and luck, to 15.25 (p < .001) for the paired categories of work and luck. The same kind of analysis (i.e., paired-samples t-test in which df was equal to 244) was conducted between the categories of fears to study the prevalence of future fears. The outstanding fear concerned the possibility of losing their health or dying, or that this should happen to their family members; the paired-samples t-test values ranged from 2.98 (p < .01) for the paired categories of illness and family, to 9.86 (p < .001) for the paired fears of illness and other fears category. This is followed by fears relating to work, family, personal relations and the fear of not being able to fulfil their dreams, paired-samples t-test for these categories achieved t values ranged from −2.86 (p < .01) for the paired categories of economic welfare and personal fulfilment, to 7.20 (p < .001) for the paired fears of work and other fears category. Not too far we found the fear of not reaching a comfortable economic position and the fear about socio-economic problems, with t values ranged from 2.33 (p < .05) for social interest and misfortune, to −6.37 (p < .001) for economic welfare and illness. Finally, we observe how aspects relating to the impossibility of finishing their studies, misfortune, losing their roots and the category of other types of fears are brought to the fore by a minority of the students who participated in the study; their t values ranged from 2.33 (p < .05) for the paired categories of social interest and misfortune, to −8.20 (p < .001) for the paired fears of roots and illness. The Pearson correlation coefficients’ between the categories of adolescents’ wishes and fears in the same domain were conducted to study the balance among them. Positive significant correlation were found in the areas of roots (r = .20, p < .01), economic (r = .43, p < .01), altruism (r = .34, p < .05), health or illness (r = .25, p < .01), relations (r = .29, p < .01), and luck or misfortune (r = .32, p < .01) whereas non-significant correlations were showed in the areas of training (r = .11, p = .10), work (r = .11, p > .10), personal fulfilment (r = .11, p > .10), family (r = .13, p = .05) and other wishes or fears category (r = .01, p > .10). 2.2. Analysis of wishes and fears according to cultural origin and gender We carried out a MANOVA with the factors: cultural origin and gender, and the 11 categories of wishes and the 11 categories of fears such as dependent variables. The variable adolescents’ origin comprises three labels: South American, African, and Spanish adolescents. The results given in Table 2 inform us of the significant differences between origin and the categories of wishes and fears. We can see how the Africans are those who most desire to maintain contact with their cultural roots and those who mention greatest wishes about work. The Spanish students are those less concerned about losing touch with their cultural roots as well as about the opportunity to live their dreams, and more concerned about reaching a comfortable economic situation. On the other hand, we see that the South American students are more afraid of the possibility of not being able to achieve their personal fulfilment. The results of the MANOVA about the gender and the categories of wishes and fears show significant differences only in the wishes of maintaining roots (F(1, 216) = 5.31, p < .05, 2 = .03, Power = .631) and work (F(1, 216) = 5.55, p < .05, 2 = .02, Power = .650). The girls have a greater wish to maintaining the culture of origin (M = .04, SD = .14) and they expressed in lesser extent aspects related to their job situation (M = .23, SD = .23) than boys (M = .01, SD = .06; M = .30, SD = .30, respectively).
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Table 2 Significant differences between cultural origins and the categories relating to the students’ wishes and fears. F(2, 215)
2
Power
a: South A.
b: Africans
c: Spaniards
Wishes Roots Work
4.04* 3.59*
.04 .03
.715 .661
.04/.11 .26/.27
.05/.18 .35/.29
.00/.03 .27/.27
b > c* b > c*
Fears
5.88** 6.57** 4.86**
.05 .06 .04
.871 .907 .798
.04/.12 .04/.14 .19/.26
.09/.24 .02/.09 .13/.29
.00/.03 .11/.18 .07/.16
b > c* a < c** , b < c** a > c**
* **
Roots Economic welfare Personal fulfilment
Mean/SD
Scheffe
p < .05. p < .01.
This MANOVA verified whether there was an interaction effect between the variables cultural origin and gender of the students on the categories of wishes and fears. We obtain marginal differences for this interaction effect in one of the wishes categories: family (F(2, 216) = 2.89, p = .06, 2 = .03, Power = .561). Independent t-test conducted to compare scores for males and females in every cultural group showed significant differences in African (t(52) = −2.14, p < .05) and Spanish samples (t(101) = −2.64, p < .05), but not in South American sample (t(86) = 0.57, p > .10). African and Spanish girls (M = .17, SD = .23; M = .27, SD = .15, respectively) wished in more extent than African and Spanish boys (M = .07, SD = .14; M = .15, SD = .19, respectively) for forming a family or maintaining that of origin. Independent t-test conducted to compare scores between cultural groups in the samples of girls and boys showed significant differences for the comparison between African and Spanish boys (t(89) = −2.14, p < .05) and African and South American boys (t(73) = 2.71, p < .01). African boys (M = .07, SD = .14) were those that less expectations have related to the family category (M = .20 and SD = .25 for South American boys; M = .15, SD = .19 for Spanish boys). 3. Discussion This study has contributed to establishing the main topics that awaken the interest and concern of adolescents. In aspects such as work, economic welfare, training, family, personal relations and health, the findings are similar to those of the researches conducted over the last several decades (Cross & Markus, 1991; King, 1995; Solantaus, 1987; Solantaus et al., 1984). Thus, King’s categories (1995) could include most of the categories created in our study. Accordingly, achievement could be broken down into our categories relating to work, training and personal fulfilment; affiliation into personal relations and family, and power would include the category economic welfare. Therefore, our data seems to prove that there are wishes and fears that continue in force at different moments in time and in a different cultural context, perhaps because they respond to basic vital needs. We also, however, detected in adolescents a growing fear and wish about maintaining their cultural roots (Briones, Tabernero, & Arenas, 2005). Although in Vandewiele’s study (1980, 1981), as we mentioned in the introduction, an example of interests of a cultural-religious type on the part of the adolescents was included, this category was not created by the authors, possibly because expressions of this type were not stated with such variability and intensity as they are by adolescents today. We consider it necessary to create this label – maintaining cultural roots – given that it responds to the new personal challenges that some adolescents encounter owing to mobilisation of populations and contact with diverse cultural groups. Besides presenting the contents of wishes and fears, it is especially interesting to highlight which of these aspects occupy a place of preference in the future of the adolescents. Thus we confirm that satisfaction with all those elements relating to work, family, personal fulfilment, and personal or family economy is the future wish for most adolescents, whereas their greatest fears lie in the possibility of suffering health problems, precarious work conditions, isolation from their family of origin or the possibility of failing to form a family as well as failure to fulfil their dreams. Although this result follows the trend shown in previous studies, in which work and personal relations take priority (Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937; Vandewiele, 1980, 1981), it also seems evident that it is closely related to the ranking of the problems most mentioned by the adult Spanish population (CIS, 2006). Then, this result is related to the conceptualization of wishes and fears such as social constructions (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006). They do not develop in isolation; youth need to be able to find connections between their possible selves and other important identities such as ethnic, national or cultural identity and to feel that important others view their possible selves as plausible (Oyserman, 2006). This point should be taking in consideration to design effective program of intervention to promote an adjusted social identity. The study of wishes and fears in conjunction allows us to demonstrate the balance of them in the same domain. We showed that the majority of the adolescents’ fears and wishes tend to revolve around the same things, e.g., if they wish to maintain their culture and the contact with their compatriots and country of origin they also showed a fear of not achieving this wish. The empirical evidence (Oyserman & Markus, 1990) supported that this aspect have important implications for social behavior (e.g., delinquency) in adolescence. Otherwise, a failure in balance was detected in areas as training, family and personal fulfilment which possibly would call for some attention, since these issues are especially relevant for the psychosocial development of adolescents.
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The adolescents in the three cultural groups show the same profile when reflecting their interest in prioritizing the achievement of favourable personal, familiar and economic conditions and in showing their concern for their own health or that of those close to them. We can explain this agreement by considering that this wish and this fear respond to the intention of fulfilling needs that are basic and universal and, hence, present in all cultural groups. We thus find ourselves in the presence of a universal wish focusing on personal development. But we can also rely on cultural differentiation and take for its explanation the concept of fluidity of the sense of self and cultural affiliation, according to which a person does not just belong to one culture (Fiske, 1993, 2002), but rather can adopt characteristics belonging to other groups and, under certain conditions, people of different cultures may even change both their behavior and their norms (Markus & Kitayama, 1998). Nevertheless, there are several subject matters in which the prevalence of the categories of adolescents’ wishes and fears differs according to the cultural group taken as a reference. Hence, South American adolescents are distinguished by wishing, to a greater extent than Spanish adolescents, for aspects that revolve around maintaining their cultural roots. Likewise, they have a greater fear of failing in their personal fulfilment. The group of African adolescents wish to maintain contact with their country of origin, as well as with the relatives and friends they left there, since feeling separated from them worries them. Also the achievement of a satisfactory job conditions figures in a prominent place in their wishes. Spanish adolescents are very concerned about the impact that possible lack of good economical welfare may have on their future. The possible absence of satisfactory personal fulfilment and relations with their roots (culture, compatriots, country of origin, etc.) did not occupy the prominent place in their fears for the future as in the other two groups, possibly owed to they are not experiencing any separation from their country. The results about the relationship of the adolescents’ gender and the prevalence of wishes and fears have not reached the same magnitude than the results owing to cultural origin. In this sense, we have found that girls are more interested in maintaining links with their cultural roots and, on the other hand, boys are differentiated by wishing for achieving a satisfactory work conditions. Our study confirms that women still have the role of carriers of ethnic traditions; they were more interested in maintaining the roots with the cultural origin. Therefore, we observe that boys tend to stand out in aspects of a more professional type. These findings follow the expected different about gender based on more interdependent self-focus in the girls and more independent self-focus in boys (Markus & Oyserman, 1989). Thus, although some of the differential effects of gender mentioned previously are maintained (Guarnaccia & Vane, 1979; Karnes & Wherry, 1981; King, 1995; Vandewiele, 1980, 1981), we also found progress with respect to previous decades, since the girls show similar interest in achieving personal fulfilment or economic welfare. Also, we only found a marginal interaction effects between origin and gender in the wish for maintaining or forming a family. African boys showed less wishes about family maintenance or creation than South American or Spanish boys. This result could be related to the different role than the man play in the family constitution and maintenance in each culture considered, but more research is needed to test it. In sum, the qualitative orientation of this work allows us to record at first hand adolescents’ interests and concerns, and the quantitative orientation reported the balance between wishes and fears, their relative frequency and prevalence, and the differences in their relative frequency according to gender and cultural group. Taking into account the empirical evidence on the linkage between possible selves and self-esteem, and the influence of possible selves on the self-regulation of behavior, the knowledge of their wishes and fears and the balance between them should facilitate the decision about the subject matter to be stressed (e.g., work, familiar and personal relations, health and personal fulfilment, training) in order to favour their level of satisfaction and social integration in their acculturation process, for example by mean of developing adequate programs (e.g., workshops of work and interpersonal skills, programs of health and personal enrichment). Hence, we consider that they should be fully taken into account in applied contexts (community and school) in which adolescents’ satisfaction and integration is dealt with (Oishi & Diener, 2001). Likewise, we consider that an interesting research line would be one leading to the development of strategies that help the teacher, or other professionals who work with adolescents, detect the latter’s objectives and concerns, and also show how to accompany them in resolving these issues and prevent them from falling into situations of despair in the face of difficulties. This is essential, since this situation of risk of social exclusion quite often leads to dissatisfaction, to the developing of self-destructive behavior (Briones, Tabernero, & Arenas, 2007) and to problems in social integration. In order to evaluate our findings some limitations should be mentioned. For example, the results about the comparisons among the cultural groups (i.e., South American, African, and Spanish) were made with broad groups, the participants attended schools that had a relatively high number of ethnic minority students, and Spain is a country with a relatively recent history of immigration. Thus we advise caution with the generalization of these findings because these results must be understood within the specific context in which this study was conducted. Moreover, here we used open questions in the measurement of wishes and fears that included the words: “the future”. Across research, possible self-measures also differ in their reference point. Some measures refer to “the future” without specification and other measures specify a reference point in terms of chronological (“next year”) or developmental (“as an adult”) time (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006). Oyserman and Markus (1990) found that use of the “adult” reference point resulted in results that were more similar across youth and did not distinguish among youth differing in delinquent involvement while use of a “next year” reference point result in more heterogeneous responses that were significantly related to delinquent involvement. Although we did not find more research that explicitly compared results from one reference point to another, it could be possible asking “the future” exclude current hopes and fears or result in more homogeneity answers.
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Acknowledgements This paper was written while the first author was a fellow post-doctoral researcher in ERCOMER, and was affiliated to Cordoba University in Spain and financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science within the National Program of Human Resources’ Mobility (I+D+I, 2008–2011). The data was collected with the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology under the grants: SEJ2006-O7741 and PSI 2009-07423. Our special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments. References Ables, B. (1972). The three wishes of latency age children. Developmental Psychology, 6, 186. Balaguer, I. (2002). Estilos de vida en la adolescencia. Valencia: Promolibro. Bardin, L. (1996). Análisis de contenido. Madrid: Ediciones Akal. Ben – Ari, A., & Lavee, Y. (2004). Cultural orientation, ethnic affiliation, and negative daily occurrences: A multidimensional cross-cultural analysis. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 74, 102–111. 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How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ? In C. S. Smith (Ed.), Handbook of thematic content analysis (pp. 49–72). New York: Cambridge University Press. Oishi, S., & Diener, E. (2001). Goals, culture, and subjective well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 1674–1682. Oyserman, D. (2006). Working with culturally/racially diverse to improve connection to school and academic performance. In C. Franklin, M. Harris, & P. Allen-Meares (Eds.), The school services sourcebook: A guide for social workers, counselors, and mental health professionals (pp. 753–764). New York: Oxford University Press. Oyserman, D., & Fryberg, S. A. (2006). The possible selves of diverse adolescents: Content and function across gender, race and national origin. In C. Dunkel, & J. Kerpelman (Eds.), Possible selves: Theory, research, and applications (pp. 17–39). Huntington, NY: Nova. Oyserman, D., & Markus, H. R. (1990). Possible selves and delinquency. 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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
International Journal of Intercultural Relations journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijintrel
Adolescents’ future wishes and fears in their acculturation process Elena Briones a,∗ , Carmen Tabernero b,1 , Alicia Arenas c,2 a b c
The European Research Center on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER), The Netherlands University of Cordoba, Department of Psychology, Avenida San Alberto Magno, sn. 14004 – Córdoba University of Sevilla, Department of Social Psychology, C/ Camilo Jose Cela, sn. 41018 – Sevilla
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Accepted 8 June 2010 Keywords: Wishes Fears Adolescents Cultural origin Acculturation
a b s t r a c t In this study we aim at learning about adolescents’ future fears and wishes from different cultural origins with a view to finding implications for intervention in the furthering of their satisfaction and social integration in their acculturation process. The study sample comprised 938 secondary school students—64.4% Spanish, 19.7% South American and 12.8% African. Wishes and fears were evaluated by means of two open questions and the answers were categorized following traditional content analysis methodology. Results show that the adolescents wish for a satisfactory job, family and economic situation, and that they are concerned about aspects such as their own health and that of their family, the possibility of having a precarious job, isolation from their family of origin, and not forming a family. The findings also allow us to give differential profiles according to the cultural origin of the adolescents. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Studying the wishes and fears expressed by adolescents gives us knowledge of the nature and level of their emotional adjustment (Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937). Thus, the object of a wish or fear can be seen as the product of how one expresses oneself (Guarnaccia & Vane, 1979). Wishes and fears have been integrated in possible selves concept in order to indicate those elements of the self-concept that represent what we would like to become and what we are afraid of becoming (Cross & Markus, 1991; Markus & Nurius, 1986). Wishes have been defined as objectives that are not restricted to the limitations of the real world (Ehrlichman & Eischenstein, 1992; Heckhausen & Kulh, 1985). Wishes are also considered to be indicators of implicit motivation (King, 1995), since they are characterized by being unconscious, primitive, automatic and intimately related to emotion. Likewise, it is maintained that they come from natural, universal incentives and from the early experiences of childhood (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1992). Moreover, fears or concerns have been defined as a subtype of anxiety that serves as an indicator of poor mental health (Davey & Tallis, 1994; Eysenck, 1992). Thus, Boehnke, Schwartz, Stromberg, and Sagiv (1998) distinguish between two kinds of concern in relation to the object which has its security threatened. “Micro” concerns have as an object the self or those with whom there is an intimate relationship (in-group or extensions of the self). “Macro” concerns have as object entities external to the self, i.e., society, the world or the universe. It has been shown that “micro” concerns (e.g., my parents may die) are strongly related to cognitive and affective indices of poor mental health, whereas “macro” concerns (e.g., unemployment in my country) are not related to mental health and can even show a positive relationship with well-being (Boehnke, 1995; Doctor, Goldenring, & Powell, 1987; Griffin & Prior, 1990).
∗ Corresponding author at: ERCOMER, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31 30 253 7987; fax: +31 30 253 4733. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (E. Briones), [email protected] (C. Tabernero), [email protected] (A. Arenas). 1 Tel.: +34 957 212535; fax: +34 957 218937. 2 Tel.: +34 635 628987; fax: +34 954 557711. 0147-1767/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijintrel.2010.06.003
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The study about wishes is also very interesting, since Markus and colleagues (Cross & Markus, 1991; Markus & Nurius, 1986) suggest that much of our significant behavior can be seen primarily as an effort to approach or avoid various possible selves. These possible selves of teens include expectations and concerns about how one will do in school, how one will fit in socially, and how to get through adolescence without becoming off-track—pregnant, arrested, or hooked on drugs (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006). According to Heckhausen and Kulh (1985), wishes are the first step on the long road that leads to action. These authors present a model that describes how wishes are developed and become intentions, and how these intentions become actions. Given that these early volitional orientations are expressed as processes of self-regulation that lead to action (Kulh, 2000) and that the content, both of wishes and fears, is linked to emotions and mental health (Davey & Tallis, 1994; Eysenck, 1992; King, 1995), we consider it necessary to go deeper into the nature of wishes and fears, in order to obtain implications as to how adolescents can be helped to achieve their life objectives and overcome their fears. Nowadays, adolescents could need more than before this intervention because the growing cultural diversity in the school, usually about immigration, makes adolescents mix frequently with students from other ethnic and cultural origins, and consequently they experience acculturation, i.e., important psychological and cultural changes (Berry, 1992). A review of the literature on adolescents’ wishes and fears shows few studies in which a comparable interest is given to wishes and fears (Cross & Markus, 1991; Markus & Nurius, 1986; Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937); most studies are confined to wishes. However, with regard to fears, from 20 years ago a number of studies dealt with fears of nuclear war (Solantaus, Rimpelä, & Taipale, 1984) and the differences of children’s fears between countries (Solantaus, 1987; Tarifa & Kloep, 1996). In this article, in order to summarize progress on these two concepts, we opted for condensing the contributions made from different research lines. Scientific studies carried out on adolescents’ wishes and fears have mainly focused on deciphering and classifying their thematic content. Thus we encounter various categorical systems that, with more or less detail, reflect the subject matter of wishes and fears. The studies carried out by Vandewiele (1980, 1981) summarized the wishes of students’ aged between 13 and 21 in seven categories: possessions and activities, money, vocation, physical and psychological benefits (e.g., personal appearance, intelligence), social relations (e.g., having a child, that my parents should never die), getting married or having a lover and altruistic wishes (e.g., benefits for the family, friends and others). King (1995) carried out a more summarized classification, encoding the wishes of students aged between 18 and 25 in the following three categories: achievement (which includes aspects of the type “to be successful in my career”, “to have musical talent”), affiliation (e.g., to have more friends, to fall in love and get married), and power (e.g., to be the king of the universe, to have control over everything). It is also interesting to bear in mind that Boehnke et al. (1998) posed that each fear refers to a particular domain in life. Thus, Boehnke, Schwartz and their colleagues (Boehnke et al., 1998; Schwartz, Sagiv, & Boehnke, 2000) consider that the different instruments used for measuring fears coincide in contemplating seven domains: health, safety, environment, social relations, meaning of life, achievement at work and in studies, and economy. Then, the categorical systems on the content of adolescents’ wishes and fears show a high degree of similarity. By comparative analysis of the results of the studies reviewed (King, 1995; Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937; Solantaus et al., 1984; Vandewiele, 1980, 1981) we detected how widely spread certain wishes and fears are. That is, adolescents tend to indicate the same principal wishes and fears. The wishes about vocational aspects are usually high on the list, followed by the wish for personal fulfilment and other expectations of a more altruistic type, such as wishing welfare for other people (Vandewiele, 1981). As regards the prevalence of concerns, aspects such as fear of war and death reached first place in the studies by Pintner and Brunschwig (1937), and Solantaus et al. (1984). These results reflect a high degree of social awareness in adolescents as to the concerns present at the socio-historical moment in which the studies were carried out, since, as we noticed, these authors obtained their results during the period prior to the Second World War (Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937) or during the threat of nuclear war (Solantaus et al., 1984). In this sense, Oyserman and Fryberg (2006) and Oyserman and Markus (1993) maintained possible selves are shaped by social context. Adolescents learn about what is possible and what is valued through engagement with their social context. In this way, social contexts provide important feedback to adolescents about whether a possible self is positively or negatively valued and can shift the perceived likelihood that an expected or feared possible self is likely. Thus, acculturation experience could give them new issues that they could consider to build their own future wishes and fears. Positive or wished, expected selves, and feared or avoided selves are often studied separately (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006). But wishes and fears can be studied in conjunction. In this sense, balance refers to the construal of both positive expectations and fears in the same domain. Youth with balanced possible selves have both a positive self-identifying goal to strive for and are aware of the personally relevant consequences of not meeting that goal. This balance may preserve motivation to attain the positive possible self and therefore avoid the negative self, leading these youths to make more attempts to attain expected selves and avoid feared ones. Only strategies that simultaneously increase the possibility of attaining the positive self and avoiding the negative self will be attempted (Oyserman & Markus, 1990). Hence, taking in mind the literature aforementioned, the first objective of this study is to identify the main wishes and fears of a multicultural sample of adolescents. In addition, we aim to analyze the balance of them in the same domain and their relative frequency because of the important implications for psychosocial development of adolescents. We underline cultural origin as a variable capable of generating differences in adolescents’ future expectations. Vandewiele (1980, 1981) thus showed differences in the prevalence of wishes between Senegalese adolescents and the Australian adolescents, with the Senegalese students showing greater interest in wishes referring to professional vocation.
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Moreover, the categories presented in these studies (Vandewiele, 1980, 1981) comprise new subject matter relating to culture-religion, such as the wish “to visit Mecca with my family”, not contemplated in studies in which other cultural groups were considered. In fact, Oyserman and Fryberg (2006) emphasized that the focus on possible selves (hopes and fears) of minority youths is needed, because these mediate between values and actual behavior. If we understand possible selves are socially constituted and maintained, it is likely that ethnic groups differ systematically in their possible selves. Then, to study possible selves of ethnic minority youth allow us to gain better understanding of the motivational world of these youths (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006, p. 8). Moreover, the cultural characteristics of the group the adolescents belong to affect the content and prevalence of their wishes and fears, since, as some authors point out (Triandis, McCusker, & Hui, 1990), these peculiarities of the group influence the cognitive thought of its members. For instance, in individualist cultures personal goals are sought, goals which reflect individual wishes and needs, whereas in collectivist cultures the goals usually pursued are communal, reflecting the wishes and needs of the members of the group (Schwartz et al., 2000). In this line, Ben – Ari & Lavee (2004) showed that the members of collectivist cultures indicate the family as the main source of concern. Also, their goals and wishes usually reflect the needs of their community rather than their personal needs as occurs in individualist cultures. Nevertheless, Sedikides, Gaertner, and Toguchi (2003) find that the wish for personal development is a universal motive. Given the impact of group culture and the growing cultural diversity of the adolescent population in our country, here our second objective is to analyze whether their hopes and fears will vary according to their cultural origin, and also according the status of the group, mainstream or minority group. We study the groups more representative (South American, African, and Spaniard) in the acculturation process experience by the adolescents in Spain. Another outstanding aspect in the studies carried out on adolescents’ wishes is the effect of gender. In the different decades in which studies of this type were made the effect of differentiation between boys and girls in specific wishes has been corroborated. That is, boys show greater interest in achieving personal development and in material aspects, whereas girls are more interested in family and social relations (Ables, 1972; Guarnaccia & Vane, 1979; Karnes & Wherry, 1981; King, 1995; Vandewiele, 1980, 1981). These authors suggest that this is a reflection of the early assuming of the gender roles present in society. Hence, boys take on the masculine, breadwinner role and girls a more dependent orientation. Thus, cultural pressure affects personal development in the direction of the divergence of gender roles. Oyserman and Fryberg (2006) maintained that gender differences may occur due to differences in cognitive and social development. In adolescence, girls are faster to develop self-awareness, self-reflection and abstract reasoning; their self-concepts contain more relational content, and by mid-adolescence, they are more likely to begin thinking about the integration of future work and family roles. These differences imply first, that possible selves will have less self-regulatory power for boys than for girls and second, that girls are less likely to develop strictly task-focused possible selves and will attempt to juggle more numerous possible selves connecting the self to others. In view of the arguments given above, our third objective aimed to analyze the differentiation of adolescents’ interests and concerns according to gender. In short, the objectives of this study are to extract the subject matter and the prevalence of adolescents’ wishes and fears, as well as analyze the relationship of both aspects with cultural origin and gender. We shall tackle these objectives following a mixed (qualitative and quantitative) methodology which is set out below. 1. Method 1.1. Sample selection criteria In order to guarantee that the sample was living an acculturation process, statistics published by the Spanish Ministry of Education for 2007–2008 were used as a reference, relating to the adolescent immigrants distribution in Spain by Autonomous Region and province. Madrid and Andalusia are home to the greatest number of immigrant students in which the Spanish is the only one official language. Within Andalusia, the province of Almeria has the highest number of immigrants and the greatest symmetry in terms of the students’ origin (35.03% Africans and 21.69% South Americans). Hence, three secondary schools were chosen at random from Madrid and another three from Almeria, in which the percentage of immigrant students was over 50% of the total to guarantee the same level of intercultural contact with students from mainstream society. The neighbourhoods were characterized by high concentrations of South American and African migrant families of a medium–low social class. 1.2. Sample The sample was formed by 938 students from Compulsory Secondary Education. The ages of the participants ranged from 12 to 18 (M = 14.19 years, SD = 1.46). Of these, 46.8% were female and 53.2% male. According to their cultural selfcategorization, and also their place of birth, 64.4% were Spanish, 22.8% South American and 12.8% African. The immigrant students had been living in Spain for an average of 3.72 years (SD = 2.28). The three groups did not differ in gender, but Spanish students were a little younger (M = 13.98 years, SD = 1.37) than South American students (M = 14.53 years, SD = 1.48, t(238) = 2.95, p < .01). South American and African students and their parents were fist generation immigrants and none of them was born in Spain. Their age of arrival in Spain was 7.05 years (SD = 5.47) and the two groups did not differ in this variable (t(234) = 1.85, p > .10). The qualitative analysis was carried out with the sample constituted by 938 students. However, since
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the samples had very different sizes and it could affect the homogeneity of variances assumption, the MANOVA with cultural origin and gender factors were carried out with a reduced sample randomly, in this way every cultural group was integrated by 120 students.
1.3. Variables and measurements Cultural self-categorization. The identification with the own cultural group was measured by one question in which the participant informed about their familiar culture between six options (Spanish, Gypsy, African, European, Asian, and South American), and also, an open option was offered. In this study was only considered the adolescents who answered Spanish, African or South American. Wishes and fears were measured by two open questions from the adaptation of the School Health Behavior Inventory (Wold, 1995), translated into Spanish by Balaguer (2002). The questions were: “when you think about your life and the future in general, which are the three things you most wish for in the future?” and “which are the three things you most fear in the future?” In order to analyze the participants’ answers a system of categories was created from the traditional content analysis methodology (Bardin, 1996; Tesch, 1990), based on the suppositions of the Grounded Theory (Henwood & Pidgeon, 2003). Grounded Theory involves a constant two-way dialectical process or “flip-flop” between data and the researcher’s conceptualizations. In this sense we consider existing typology and we try to take the emerging from data, following the first phase of this Grounded Theory: “open-coding to capture the detail, variation, and complexity of the basic qualitative material” (Henwood & Pidgeon, 2003, p. 136). This kind of iterative method to detecting the regularities allowed us to develop a system of categories (Henwood & Pidgeon, 2003), with in turn were grouped thematically and functionally in an articulated global system because of in this analysis was detected that answer content of wishes and fears were similar, then we created the same categories for wishes and fears. Once categories were built and defined we encoded the 10% of the cases for testing the exhaustive and exclusive features of the categories. As a result of this process the 11 categories applicable to the wishes and fears we give in Table 1 were formulated.
Table 1 Categories relating to adolescents’ future wishes and fears, and means and SD of their relative frequency. Label
Definition
Examples: wishes/fears
Mean: wishes/fears
SD: wishes/fears
Maintaining roots
Statements that reflect interest in returning to or visiting their own country of origin or that of their parents. Interest and concern for studies and training. Aspects relating to the students’ occupational and professional future. Comments that reflect the perception of economic, physical and personal security. Interest and concern for social welfare, ecology, distribution of wealth, peace, public safety, etc. Interest and concern for achieving dreams about what they want to be and do in the future. Fear of physical illness, pain and dying; and a wish to enjoy good health (at a self-referential level and at the level of personal surroundings). Aspects relating to the creation and maintenance of relations with friends, family or partner. Expectations and fears relating to forming a family or maintaining that of origin. Fear of having bad luck and a wish to be lucky in life. Interest and concern not coinciding with any of the previous categories.
“To get to know my parents’ country”/“Never going back to my country”
.03/.03
.11/.13
“To study and graduate in Law”/“To repeat a year” “To work in something that I like”/“Not having a decent job”
.07/.05
.16/.15
.29/.13
.29/.21
“To have a house of my own”/“Not having enough money to buy my things” “To help people in need”/“Corrupt policies”
.12/.07
.20/.16
.02/.09
.12/.23
“To be happy”/“To fail”
.14/.12
.23/.23
“To have good health”/“To suffer illness”
.05/.20
.14/.27
“To have more friends”/“Not being able to trust anybody”
.07/.12
.15/.22
“To get married and adopt children”/“To be separated from my family” “To be lucky”/“To have an accident” “To have a pet”/“that there won’t be any flying cars”
.18/.13
.23/.22
.01/.04
.04/.13
.01/.03
.09/.13
Training Work
Economic welfare
Altruism or social interests
Personal fulfilment
Illness, health and death
Personal relations
Family
Luck or misfortune Others
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The encoding of the answers was independently carried out by two research assistants, who were not familiar with the study objectives, and who received prior instruction in the definitions of the categories. The inter-judge reliability calculated by Kappa concordance coefficient reached scores that range between .87 and .95, therefore agreement between the judges was almost perfect (Viera & Garrett, 2005). Finally, disagreements were solved by consensus. Each wish or fear is taken as a unit as in other studies (e.g., King, 1995). Then, data analysis was performed with the 22 variables – 11 referring to wishes and another 11 to fears – created with the relative frequency of appearance of each category (i.e., score ranges between 0 and 1) since there were adolescents who did not reported wishes and fears in the three options of answer. 2. Results 2.1. Future wishes and fears prevalence and relations between them in the same domain We performed paired-samples t-test between all pairs of wishes in order to establish their significant prevalence. In order to summarize a large of information about these analyses, here is only described the ranged of significant t values (df = 244, means and SD can be seen in Table 1). Results showed that students expressed wishes referring to work in more extend than other wishes, since the comparison of this category with all others categories were significant (p < .001) and t values ranged from 4.32 for the paired categories of work and family, to 15.25 for the paired categories of work and luck. In second place, we found family, personal fulfilment and economic welfare as future wishes; their t values ranged from 3.20 (p < .01) for the paired categories of economic welfare and relations, to 11.58 (p < .001) for the paired categories of family and luck. Followed we had the wish to have satisfactory personal relations, continue their studies, and enjoy good health; in this case their t values ranged from −2.14 (p < .05) for the paired wishes of roots and health, to −9.67 (p < .001) for training and work paired of categories. Wishes relating to altruism or interests of a social nature, keeping in touch with one’s roots, and other types of wishes category were in fourth place; and their paired-samples t-test values ranged from 2.09 (p < .05) for the paired categories of altruism and luck, to −12.85 (p < .001) for roots and work. Finally, luck was that less outstanding in the set of students who took part in the study; comparisons of this category with all other categories were significant and t values ranged from 2.96 (p < .05) for the paired categories of roots and luck, to 15.25 (p < .001) for the paired categories of work and luck. The same kind of analysis (i.e., paired-samples t-test in which df was equal to 244) was conducted between the categories of fears to study the prevalence of future fears. The outstanding fear concerned the possibility of losing their health or dying, or that this should happen to their family members; the paired-samples t-test values ranged from 2.98 (p < .01) for the paired categories of illness and family, to 9.86 (p < .001) for the paired fears of illness and other fears category. This is followed by fears relating to work, family, personal relations and the fear of not being able to fulfil their dreams, paired-samples t-test for these categories achieved t values ranged from −2.86 (p < .01) for the paired categories of economic welfare and personal fulfilment, to 7.20 (p < .001) for the paired fears of work and other fears category. Not too far we found the fear of not reaching a comfortable economic position and the fear about socio-economic problems, with t values ranged from 2.33 (p < .05) for social interest and misfortune, to −6.37 (p < .001) for economic welfare and illness. Finally, we observe how aspects relating to the impossibility of finishing their studies, misfortune, losing their roots and the category of other types of fears are brought to the fore by a minority of the students who participated in the study; their t values ranged from 2.33 (p < .05) for the paired categories of social interest and misfortune, to −8.20 (p < .001) for the paired fears of roots and illness. The Pearson correlation coefficients’ between the categories of adolescents’ wishes and fears in the same domain were conducted to study the balance among them. Positive significant correlation were found in the areas of roots (r = .20, p < .01), economic (r = .43, p < .01), altruism (r = .34, p < .05), health or illness (r = .25, p < .01), relations (r = .29, p < .01), and luck or misfortune (r = .32, p < .01) whereas non-significant correlations were showed in the areas of training (r = .11, p = .10), work (r = .11, p > .10), personal fulfilment (r = .11, p > .10), family (r = .13, p = .05) and other wishes or fears category (r = .01, p > .10). 2.2. Analysis of wishes and fears according to cultural origin and gender We carried out a MANOVA with the factors: cultural origin and gender, and the 11 categories of wishes and the 11 categories of fears such as dependent variables. The variable adolescents’ origin comprises three labels: South American, African, and Spanish adolescents. The results given in Table 2 inform us of the significant differences between origin and the categories of wishes and fears. We can see how the Africans are those who most desire to maintain contact with their cultural roots and those who mention greatest wishes about work. The Spanish students are those less concerned about losing touch with their cultural roots as well as about the opportunity to live their dreams, and more concerned about reaching a comfortable economic situation. On the other hand, we see that the South American students are more afraid of the possibility of not being able to achieve their personal fulfilment. The results of the MANOVA about the gender and the categories of wishes and fears show significant differences only in the wishes of maintaining roots (F(1, 216) = 5.31, p < .05, 2 = .03, Power = .631) and work (F(1, 216) = 5.55, p < .05, 2 = .02, Power = .650). The girls have a greater wish to maintaining the culture of origin (M = .04, SD = .14) and they expressed in lesser extent aspects related to their job situation (M = .23, SD = .23) than boys (M = .01, SD = .06; M = .30, SD = .30, respectively).
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Table 2 Significant differences between cultural origins and the categories relating to the students’ wishes and fears. F(2, 215)
2
Power
a: South A.
b: Africans
c: Spaniards
Wishes Roots Work
4.04* 3.59*
.04 .03
.715 .661
.04/.11 .26/.27
.05/.18 .35/.29
.00/.03 .27/.27
b > c* b > c*
Fears
5.88** 6.57** 4.86**
.05 .06 .04
.871 .907 .798
.04/.12 .04/.14 .19/.26
.09/.24 .02/.09 .13/.29
.00/.03 .11/.18 .07/.16
b > c* a < c** , b < c** a > c**
* **
Roots Economic welfare Personal fulfilment
Mean/SD
Scheffe
p < .05. p < .01.
This MANOVA verified whether there was an interaction effect between the variables cultural origin and gender of the students on the categories of wishes and fears. We obtain marginal differences for this interaction effect in one of the wishes categories: family (F(2, 216) = 2.89, p = .06, 2 = .03, Power = .561). Independent t-test conducted to compare scores for males and females in every cultural group showed significant differences in African (t(52) = −2.14, p < .05) and Spanish samples (t(101) = −2.64, p < .05), but not in South American sample (t(86) = 0.57, p > .10). African and Spanish girls (M = .17, SD = .23; M = .27, SD = .15, respectively) wished in more extent than African and Spanish boys (M = .07, SD = .14; M = .15, SD = .19, respectively) for forming a family or maintaining that of origin. Independent t-test conducted to compare scores between cultural groups in the samples of girls and boys showed significant differences for the comparison between African and Spanish boys (t(89) = −2.14, p < .05) and African and South American boys (t(73) = 2.71, p < .01). African boys (M = .07, SD = .14) were those that less expectations have related to the family category (M = .20 and SD = .25 for South American boys; M = .15, SD = .19 for Spanish boys). 3. Discussion This study has contributed to establishing the main topics that awaken the interest and concern of adolescents. In aspects such as work, economic welfare, training, family, personal relations and health, the findings are similar to those of the researches conducted over the last several decades (Cross & Markus, 1991; King, 1995; Solantaus, 1987; Solantaus et al., 1984). Thus, King’s categories (1995) could include most of the categories created in our study. Accordingly, achievement could be broken down into our categories relating to work, training and personal fulfilment; affiliation into personal relations and family, and power would include the category economic welfare. Therefore, our data seems to prove that there are wishes and fears that continue in force at different moments in time and in a different cultural context, perhaps because they respond to basic vital needs. We also, however, detected in adolescents a growing fear and wish about maintaining their cultural roots (Briones, Tabernero, & Arenas, 2005). Although in Vandewiele’s study (1980, 1981), as we mentioned in the introduction, an example of interests of a cultural-religious type on the part of the adolescents was included, this category was not created by the authors, possibly because expressions of this type were not stated with such variability and intensity as they are by adolescents today. We consider it necessary to create this label – maintaining cultural roots – given that it responds to the new personal challenges that some adolescents encounter owing to mobilisation of populations and contact with diverse cultural groups. Besides presenting the contents of wishes and fears, it is especially interesting to highlight which of these aspects occupy a place of preference in the future of the adolescents. Thus we confirm that satisfaction with all those elements relating to work, family, personal fulfilment, and personal or family economy is the future wish for most adolescents, whereas their greatest fears lie in the possibility of suffering health problems, precarious work conditions, isolation from their family of origin or the possibility of failing to form a family as well as failure to fulfil their dreams. Although this result follows the trend shown in previous studies, in which work and personal relations take priority (Pintner & Brunschwig, 1937; Vandewiele, 1980, 1981), it also seems evident that it is closely related to the ranking of the problems most mentioned by the adult Spanish population (CIS, 2006). Then, this result is related to the conceptualization of wishes and fears such as social constructions (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006). They do not develop in isolation; youth need to be able to find connections between their possible selves and other important identities such as ethnic, national or cultural identity and to feel that important others view their possible selves as plausible (Oyserman, 2006). This point should be taking in consideration to design effective program of intervention to promote an adjusted social identity. The study of wishes and fears in conjunction allows us to demonstrate the balance of them in the same domain. We showed that the majority of the adolescents’ fears and wishes tend to revolve around the same things, e.g., if they wish to maintain their culture and the contact with their compatriots and country of origin they also showed a fear of not achieving this wish. The empirical evidence (Oyserman & Markus, 1990) supported that this aspect have important implications for social behavior (e.g., delinquency) in adolescence. Otherwise, a failure in balance was detected in areas as training, family and personal fulfilment which possibly would call for some attention, since these issues are especially relevant for the psychosocial development of adolescents.
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The adolescents in the three cultural groups show the same profile when reflecting their interest in prioritizing the achievement of favourable personal, familiar and economic conditions and in showing their concern for their own health or that of those close to them. We can explain this agreement by considering that this wish and this fear respond to the intention of fulfilling needs that are basic and universal and, hence, present in all cultural groups. We thus find ourselves in the presence of a universal wish focusing on personal development. But we can also rely on cultural differentiation and take for its explanation the concept of fluidity of the sense of self and cultural affiliation, according to which a person does not just belong to one culture (Fiske, 1993, 2002), but rather can adopt characteristics belonging to other groups and, under certain conditions, people of different cultures may even change both their behavior and their norms (Markus & Kitayama, 1998). Nevertheless, there are several subject matters in which the prevalence of the categories of adolescents’ wishes and fears differs according to the cultural group taken as a reference. Hence, South American adolescents are distinguished by wishing, to a greater extent than Spanish adolescents, for aspects that revolve around maintaining their cultural roots. Likewise, they have a greater fear of failing in their personal fulfilment. The group of African adolescents wish to maintain contact with their country of origin, as well as with the relatives and friends they left there, since feeling separated from them worries them. Also the achievement of a satisfactory job conditions figures in a prominent place in their wishes. Spanish adolescents are very concerned about the impact that possible lack of good economical welfare may have on their future. The possible absence of satisfactory personal fulfilment and relations with their roots (culture, compatriots, country of origin, etc.) did not occupy the prominent place in their fears for the future as in the other two groups, possibly owed to they are not experiencing any separation from their country. The results about the relationship of the adolescents’ gender and the prevalence of wishes and fears have not reached the same magnitude than the results owing to cultural origin. In this sense, we have found that girls are more interested in maintaining links with their cultural roots and, on the other hand, boys are differentiated by wishing for achieving a satisfactory work conditions. Our study confirms that women still have the role of carriers of ethnic traditions; they were more interested in maintaining the roots with the cultural origin. Therefore, we observe that boys tend to stand out in aspects of a more professional type. These findings follow the expected different about gender based on more interdependent self-focus in the girls and more independent self-focus in boys (Markus & Oyserman, 1989). Thus, although some of the differential effects of gender mentioned previously are maintained (Guarnaccia & Vane, 1979; Karnes & Wherry, 1981; King, 1995; Vandewiele, 1980, 1981), we also found progress with respect to previous decades, since the girls show similar interest in achieving personal fulfilment or economic welfare. Also, we only found a marginal interaction effects between origin and gender in the wish for maintaining or forming a family. African boys showed less wishes about family maintenance or creation than South American or Spanish boys. This result could be related to the different role than the man play in the family constitution and maintenance in each culture considered, but more research is needed to test it. In sum, the qualitative orientation of this work allows us to record at first hand adolescents’ interests and concerns, and the quantitative orientation reported the balance between wishes and fears, their relative frequency and prevalence, and the differences in their relative frequency according to gender and cultural group. Taking into account the empirical evidence on the linkage between possible selves and self-esteem, and the influence of possible selves on the self-regulation of behavior, the knowledge of their wishes and fears and the balance between them should facilitate the decision about the subject matter to be stressed (e.g., work, familiar and personal relations, health and personal fulfilment, training) in order to favour their level of satisfaction and social integration in their acculturation process, for example by mean of developing adequate programs (e.g., workshops of work and interpersonal skills, programs of health and personal enrichment). Hence, we consider that they should be fully taken into account in applied contexts (community and school) in which adolescents’ satisfaction and integration is dealt with (Oishi & Diener, 2001). Likewise, we consider that an interesting research line would be one leading to the development of strategies that help the teacher, or other professionals who work with adolescents, detect the latter’s objectives and concerns, and also show how to accompany them in resolving these issues and prevent them from falling into situations of despair in the face of difficulties. This is essential, since this situation of risk of social exclusion quite often leads to dissatisfaction, to the developing of self-destructive behavior (Briones, Tabernero, & Arenas, 2007) and to problems in social integration. In order to evaluate our findings some limitations should be mentioned. For example, the results about the comparisons among the cultural groups (i.e., South American, African, and Spanish) were made with broad groups, the participants attended schools that had a relatively high number of ethnic minority students, and Spain is a country with a relatively recent history of immigration. Thus we advise caution with the generalization of these findings because these results must be understood within the specific context in which this study was conducted. Moreover, here we used open questions in the measurement of wishes and fears that included the words: “the future”. Across research, possible self-measures also differ in their reference point. Some measures refer to “the future” without specification and other measures specify a reference point in terms of chronological (“next year”) or developmental (“as an adult”) time (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006). Oyserman and Markus (1990) found that use of the “adult” reference point resulted in results that were more similar across youth and did not distinguish among youth differing in delinquent involvement while use of a “next year” reference point result in more heterogeneous responses that were significantly related to delinquent involvement. Although we did not find more research that explicitly compared results from one reference point to another, it could be possible asking “the future” exclude current hopes and fears or result in more homogeneity answers.
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