The Importance of Cultural Identity in Adoption: A Study of Young People Adopted from Romania

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celia Beckett ◽  
Amanda Hawkins ◽  
Michael Rutter ◽  
Jenny Castle ◽  
Emma Colvert ◽  
...  

This article by Celia Beckett, Amanda Hawkins, Michael Rutter, Jenny Castle, Emma Colvert, Christine Groothues, Jana Kreppner, Suzanne Stevens and Edmund Sonuga-Barke examines attitudes regarding cultural and national identity in a group of 165 young people adopted from Romania. The attitudes of their adoptive parents are also explored. The adoptive parents were interviewed over three or four time periods, when their children were 4/6, 11 and 15 years, and the adopted young people at the age of 11 and 15. The majority of the adopted young people had an interest in Romania and expressed a wish to visit their country of origin. However, there was no association between this interest in Romanian identity and levels of self-esteem. The majority of the adoptees saw themselves as English or Anglo-Romanian. A small minority saw themselves as Romanian; these adoptees had both lower self-esteem and a higher level of deprivation-specific problems. The degree of sustained interest shown by adoptive parents in the importance of Romanian identity was associated with the adopted young people's interest in Romania. However, parental interest in this issue had significantly declined by the time the children were 11 years old, by which time fewer adoptive parents than young people had plans to visit Romania in the future.

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Adrian Morawiak ◽  
Błażej Mrozinski ◽  
Joanna Gutral ◽  
Marzena Cypryańska ◽  
John B Nezlek

Aim: The present study was designed to examine relationships between young people’s self-concepts and their perceptions of their futures Methods: High school students (n = 347) completed measures of the two domains of self‑concept, the evaluative domain, self-esteem, and the knowledge or structural domain, self-concept clarity. They also completed two measures of perceptions of their futures, optimism and future time perspective. Results: Both measures of self-concept were positively correlated with both measures of perception of the future. For both measures of perceptions of the future, regression analyses found that when perceptions of the future were regressed onto the two measures of self-concept perceptions of the future were significantly related to only self-esteem. Relationships between perceptions of the future and self-concept clarity were not significant. Analyses of mediation found that self-esteem mediated the relationship between self-concept clarity and both measures of perceptions of the future. Conclusion: Young people with a clearer sense of self and who have higher self-esteem are more optimistic and perceive a longer future than young people with a less clear sense of self and who have lower self-esteem; however, the effects of self-concept clarity disappear after the relationship between clarity and self-esteem are taken into account.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-473
Author(s):  
Maria Karaivanova

Aim. A quantitative study on generational differences showed a decrease in optimism among the young generation (Karaivanova, 2016). The present work aims to study in detail the relationship between individualistic values, self-esteem, and optimism among the Millennial generation. Optimism is a general expectation for positive results and positive events in life (Radoslavova & Velichkov, 2005). Method. A sample of 204 respondents from 20 to 35 years old voluntarily filled in a survey containing scales measuring individualistic values, self-esteem, and optimism. The relationship between these variables was tested using regression and mediation analyses. The results were processed using the statistical software SPSS, version 22.0.0.0, and the lavaan application in R Studio. Results. The theoretical model created and tested in this study proved to have good explanatory power for the dependent variable optimism explaining one-third of its variance and gives significant clarity on the relationship between individualistic values, self-esteem, and optimism for the young generation in Bulgaria. Conclusion. Individualistic values turned out to predict self-esteem. The more individualistic a person is, the higher they perceive their competences and social image. At the same time, being individualistic, i.e. being open for change and following one’s own interests does not make young people look more optimistically towards the future and believe in the solution of every problem they encounter. Individualistic values have a positive mediated effect on optimism with self-esteem as a mediator. Having strong self-confidence makes young people have positive expectations for the future.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Yates

<p>This study examines the experience of children who have recently migrated to a cultural and language different country. The focus is on the voice of the children regarding this experience. The children were developing a bi-cultural identity for both their country of origin and their new country. The experience is not a negative one as first thought. The students are not living on Mars but living in a new place of experiences and potential for the future. </p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Yates

<p>This study examines the experience of children who have recently migrated to a cultural and language different country. The focus is on the voice of the children regarding this experience. The children were developing a bi-cultural identity for both their country of origin and their new country. The experience is not a negative one as first thought. The students are not living on Mars but living in a new place of experiences and potential for the future. </p>


2014 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalerante Evagelia

AbstractThe present paper is involved with the Pedagogical faculties’ students’ critique on the current educational system as it has been altered after 1981. The research was carried out utilizing both quantitative and qualitative tools. Students-voters participated in the interviews whereas active voters were difficult to be located to meet the research requirements. The dynamics of the specific political party is based on a popular profile in terms of standpoints related to economic, social and political issues. The research findings depict the students’ strong wish for a change of the curricula and a turn towards History and Religion as well as an elevation of the Greek historic events, as the History books that have been written and taught at schools over the past years contributed to the downgrading of the Greek national and cultural identity. There is also a students’ strong belief that globalization and the immigrants’ presence in Greece have functioned in a negative way against the Greek ideal. Therefore, an overall change of the educational content could open the path towards the reconstruction of the moral values and the Greek national identity.


MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Gisela K. Cánepa

Nation branding plays a central role within neoliberal governmentality, operating as a technology of power in the configuration of emerging cultural and political formations such as national identity, citizenship and the state. The discussion of the advertising spot Perú, Nebraska  released as part of the Nation Branding campaign Marca Perú  in May of 2011, constitutes a great opportunity to: (i) argue about the way in which audiovisual advertisement products, designed as performative devises, operate as technologies of power; and (ii) problematize the terms in which it founds a new social contract for the Peruvian multicultural national community. This analysis will allow me to approach neoliberalism as a cultural regime in order to discuss the ideological nature of the uncontested celebratory discourse that has emerged in Perú and which explains the economic growth of the last decades as the outcome of a national entrepreneurial spirit that would be distinctive of Peruvian cultural identity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 108-117
Author(s):  
Anna G. Bodrova

Ivan Cankar (1876–1918), who occupies an honorable place in the Slovenian cultural canon, once changed the course of development of Slovenian literature and influenced the formation of national identity. The national narrative of Cankar was based on contradictions: living far from his people, he sometimes glorified them and sometimes attacked them with heavy criticism; he correlated his homeland with his mother, the mother though being dead. Cankar’s concentration on the subject of mother and homeland is interpreted here in the framework of psychoanalysis. Following Slavoj Žižek, the author develops the idea that it was the mother who became the Symbolic Order representative or Super-Ego for the writer. The concept of “Cankar’s mother”, which became a symbol of self-sacrifice and at the same time repressiveness in the Slovenian cultural space, is considered.


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