Transcript Title

The Ostrich effect: Social representations
of Immigrants’ identity by native
adolescents and by immigrants from
Ethiopian and the former USSR
Adi Mana & Emda Orr
Ben Gurion University, Israel
The research aim
To investigate how members of a hostmajority group ,Jewish adolescents in
Israel, and their immigrant peers from
Ethiopia and the former USSR, represent
the immigrants’ identity within a context of
shared schooling.
Immigration in the Israeli context
Immigration is an integral part of
Israel’s social and cultural context. It is
extensively discussed by Israeli society
members and by the media.
Unlike many other immigrant
societies, immigration to Israel
is viewed as a kind of repatriation.
This ideological and official representations
indicated that the immigrants should gain an
equal and a similar social status as their
hosts.
Socially, however, during the earlier days
of Israel as a country, the immigrants were
expected to be assimilated into the
Israeli society by accepting its identity
symbols, and giving up their original ones.
Only by that, they could change their
lower social status.
• From the Eighties and onwards, we
find a change in these kinds of
representations and a multicultural
ideology regarding immigration was
developed hand in hand with that of
assimilation.
• In the last two decades, immigration to
Israel was about a sixth of the hosts
population.
• Most of them came from the former
USSR and the minority came from
Ethiopia
Differences between the Ethiopian and the
Former Soviet Union Immigrants
• Group size: 60,000 vs. 1,000,000 (about a fifth
of the Jewish population in Israel)
• African Semi-nomadic tribes vs. highly
educated European industrial backgrounds
• Visual differences from the host majority vs.
visual similarity
• In spite the differences between the two
immigrant groups, both groups
confronted the same host society;
members of both were exposed, to some
extent, to similar representations through
the mass media and through
communication with each other and with
the host society in diverse contexts
they have the opportunity to
construct shared social representations
regarding immigrants identity
Identity representations
• representations which locate a group
and its members (immigrants)
compared to other sections within a
society (host society) (Breakwell,
2001; Duveen, 2001)
We will focus on two central
aspects of immigrant identity
representations within the Israeli
context:
representations of social status
(Social Identity Theory; Tajfel, 1981)
representations of acculturation
(Berry, 1984)
METHOD
Participants
• 1,626, high school students aged 14-16,
studying in ninth and tenth grades
across Israel.
• Of these, 854 (495 girls) were students
from the host society who were born in
Israel, 241 (148 girls) of Ethiopian origin
and 531 (326 girls) born in the former
Soviet Union
Instruments
The Immigrant Identity Questionnaire (IIQ) is three
versions (for Immigrants from Ethiopia and from
the FUSSR, and for the hosts) combined of 42
items, Likert-style (1=highly wrong to 4=highly
correct).
The items were locally adapted combined version
of Berry’s scale for tapping five acculturation
attitudes (Berry et al.1989) and of seven identity
strategies derived from the Social Identity Theory
(Blanz et al, 1998)
• The Immigrants were asked to refer to
themselves, while the hosts were asked in
regard to their attributions to the Immigrant
students
• The questionnaire was administered during
2002 in a one-hour class session.
RESULTS
• A similar two dimensional construction
of the IIQ items appeared on the SSA
maps (Guttman, 1968) of each of the research
groups.
Four regions of semantic commonality
were identified
SSA map of the Ethiopian sample
SSA map of the host sample
SSA map of the FUSSR sample
Extended identity
Representing the intergroup
encounter as an enrichment of
the Immigrant's self and social
identity. The immigrants sense
own strength and competence
and simultaneously are willing
to accept new identity symbols
from the host society.
Rivalry Identity
Representing the immigrants as ready
to fight for more public resources and
for enhancement of their social power
Secluded Identity
• Representing the immigrants students as
willing to separate themselves from the
host society; separation may either be the
result of rejection by the hosts or the
immigrants self-motivation.
Identity Loss
• Representing the immigrant students
as wish to be assimilated into Israeli
society, but sense a failure in
surrendering their original identity
and in adopting the symbols of the
local society.
• The findings indicated that in spite of their
distinct social positioning and distinct
cultural background, host, Ethiopian and
FUSSR students who shared a school
constructed the immigrant identity by
similar shared representations.
• However, group differences were found
regarding the strength of the four
representations.
• The results of two-ways ANOVA showed that
host students just like their immigrants peers
constructed the immigrants identities as
multicultural (We can see that for each of the
research groups, the Extended Identity was the
highest, and significantly different from the other
identities)
• However, the host students attributed to the
immigrants students significantly lower Extended
and Rivalry identities and higher Secluded and
Identity Loss identities compared to the
immigrants self- attributions
Table 2. Means (and SD) of Immigrant Identities: 4 (between) X 4 (within)
ANCOVA (scale: 1-4)
Identity
Ethiopians
Russians
Host about
Host about
Ethiopians
Russians
Extended
3.32 (0.35)a
3.25 (0.39)e
3.09 (0.42)a
3.00 (0.44)e
Rivalry
3.00 (0.48)b,i
2.60 (0.56)f,i
2.46 (0.43)b
2.47 (0.50)f
Secluded
2.07 (0.50)c
2.01 (0.55)g
2.18 (0.55)c
2.30 (0.57)g
Identity Loss
1.80 (0.48)d
1.85 (0.45)h
2.23 (0.42)d
2.30 (0.43)h
Note: a to h indicate significant differences between the immigrant group and the
relevant host group (p<.005, Duncan pair-wise comparison).
Interpretation
• Extended and Rivalry identities mean the
empowerment of the minority group.
The Extended identity meaning is that the
immigrant students look for their empowerment
by identification with the representations of the
majority without a diminish in the strength of
their original identity.
By Rivalry identity the immigrants fight for
general recognition of their specific identity
symbols as much as for more public resources
• On the other hand, Secluded identity and Identity
loss are less likely to mean social empowerment;
Secluded identity means enclosure within one’s
society with its conventional lower social status,
and Identity loss means excepting one’s lower
status and marginalization
The host students under-rated identity
representations reflecting immigrants social
empowerment and over-rated identity
representations reflecting immigrants acceptance
of their lower social status
The Ostrich effect
The “Ostrich effect”
• It seems that the host students, just like the
ostrich, refuse to acknowledge the extent of the
immigrant minority empowerment.
• Two interpretations seem viable:
1. The biased attributions result from a sense of threat involved in
a situation in which the immigrants tend to replace hosts in the
social hierarchy, and perhaps they would change the
contemporary Israeli culture
2. The biased attributions result from sense of superiority, with its
devaluation of the power of the immigrant societies
The answer as to which of these interpretations, if any, is
appropriate, needs to be investigated further in the future
The findings may indicate an answer to
the question of whether the shared
immigrants and host representational
express a “new” multicultural ideology,
And the answer is that the “old”
representations regarding the host
superiority over the immigrants are still
dominant, as featured by the findings
regarding the representational system.
Thank you