Author:

Keywords:

creativity, biculturalism, minority, acculturation

Abstract:

There is a well-documented attainment gap between minority and majority youth in Europe: In higher education, minorities are under-represented (Phalet, Deboosere, & Bastiaenssen, 2007), and in secondary school, they face higher risks of dropping out and of being placed in non-academic educational tracks (Baysu & Phalet, 2012). However, there is increasing evidence that immigrant minorities’ exposure to a host culture is associated with higher cognitive complexity and, therefore, with higher creativity (e.g., Leung et al.,2008).Bicultural individuals’ exposure to different cultural perspectives may thus enable them to generate more creative and original ideas than majority members, which could – if fully developed and acknowledged – buffer their current disadvantaged positions in the educational system. Moreover, it may be expected that those minority members who engage more in the host culture, display higher creativity than others. Therefore, the first aim of the current research was to replicate the link between biculturalism and creativity in a Belgian sample of minority and majority adolescents. The second aim was to extend the previous literature by operationalizing the exposure to the host culture in various ways. More specifically, we examined self-reported tendencies to adopt the new culture’s customs and practices, the integration of their bicultural identities, as well as the use of majority and heritage culture languages in their daily life. In addition, we examined biculturals’ emotional fit with the host culture as a rather implicit measure of their engagement in the majority culture. Eighty adolescents (aged 15-16) from high schools across Flanders, Belgium, participated in an online questionnaire. Creativity was measured with the Alternate Uses Test (Guilford, 1967). Biculturalism was assessed both explicitly and implicitly in terms of i)acculturation strategies (AHIMSA scale; Unger et al., 2002), identities (Bicultural Identity Integration; Benet-Martinez,2005),and acculturation proxies such as the frequency with which the heritage and new culture’s languages are used among friends and family, as well as ii)their emotional fit with the new culture (Emotional Patterns Questionnaire, De Leersnyder, Mesquita, & Kim, 2011). In addition to partially replicating findings from previous research, the current study sheds light on the relationship between bicultural adolescents’ levels of creativity and different aspects of their engagement to the majority culture. The findings will be discussed in light of the existing creativity theories and the previous research on the immigrants’ acculturation process.