Mixed national family constellations – a qualitative study on their impact on identity construal processes in emerging adults growing up in transcultural contexts.

Given migration flows and increased interconnectedness across societies, more and more children are growing up in mixed national families and or outside their or their parents´ country of birth. Growing up, these children are exposed to different cultural influences and must navigate, negotiate and integrate these. The present qualitative study investigated how persons growing up in different mixed national family constellations perceive parental efforts to transfer traditions, values and language and how this affects their self-perception and identity construal strategies. Building on the Multicultural Identity Framework (Yampolsky et al., 2013), we investigated the preference for categorization, compartmentalization or integration strategy and explored the reasons why. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine young adults (age range between 19 and 23 years) growing up in different family constellations. Some had mono-national, others mixed-national parents – but all grew up in a country different to their parents´ nationalities. Some parents were still together – others were separated. We investigated to what extent and how these microecological factors within the family structure impact the identity construal process of emerging adults.
The study shows that individual family constellations and cultural influences affect identity strategies in transcultural contexts in a multifaceted way. In our sample, participants growing up in mono-national families in a third country tended to exhibit bicultural competence and positive attitudes towards their cultural influences and followed an integration strategy. In mixed-national families, language transmission could be hampered, especially in separated families, and different identity strategies were adopted. The findings will be explained and implications discussed.