The Migration Experience: A Conceptual Framework and Systematic Scoping Review of Psychological Acculturation

One of the key challenges to researching psychological acculturation is the immense heterogeneity in theories and measures. These inconsistencies make it difficult to compare past literature, hinder straightforward measurement selections, and stifle theoretical integration. To structure acculturation, we propose to utilize the four basic aspects of human experiences (wanting, feeling, thinking, and doing) as a conceptual framework. We use this framework to build a theory-driven assessment of past theoretical (final N = 92), psychometric (final N = 233), and empirical literature (final N = 530). We find that the framework allows us to examine and compare past conceptualizations. For example, empirical works have understudied the more internal aspects of acculturation (i.e., motivations and feelings) compared with theoretical works. We, then, discuss the framework's novel insights including its temporal resolution, its comprehensive and cross-cultural structure, and how the framework can aid transparent and functional theories, studies, and interventions going forward.

This systematic scoping review indicates that the concept of psychological acculturation can be structured in terms of affect (e.g., feeling at home), behavior (e.g., language use), cognition (e.g., ethnic identification), and desire (e.g., independence wish). We find that the framework is useful in structuring past research and helps with new predictions and interventions. We, for example, find a crucial disconnect between theory and practice, which will need to be resolved in the future.