PSY 365 Psychology of Diversity - Essay Example

At the seminar students volunteered to participate and completed the first questionnaire. Some of these were subsequently located in the United States and completed mail surveys. Ultimately the sample of 155 completed all questionnaires. The participants pursued graduate education in thirty-one American states, with the highest concentration in California followed by New, and Michigan, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. The variables measured were: acculturative stressors, affiliation with Taiwanese and Americans, English competence and their effect on adjustment.

There were two control variables mentioned; these were the need to improve one’s English ability and extroversion. There were several hypotheses related to the effect that ethnic density would have on the variables acculturative stressors, affiliation with Taiwanese and Americans and English competence, and the resulting effect of these on adjustment. The authors sum up the hypotheses thus, “In sum, we hypothesized that acculturative stressors, affiliation with Americans, and English competency would be greater while affiliation with Taiwanese would be less for students in lower ethnic density schools as compared to those in higher ethnic density schools by the second semester.

Furthermore, adjustment in the third semester would be predicted by acculturative stressors, affiliation with Americans, and English competence on lower ethnic density campuses, but affiliation with Taiwanese on higher ethnic density campuses, controlling for extroversion and baseline English ability”. The results of the study showed that in fact when there were more Taiwanese students on the campus there was more affiliation with them. On schools with moderate numbers of Taiwanese students there was indeed greater affiliation with Americans and better English competence.

However the presence of acculturative stressors, affiliation with Americans and English competence enhanced adjustment only