| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 教育心理與輔導學系 === 100 === Based upon the new immigrant children’s biracial identity, the researcher hopes to explore the biracial identity they developed, how it interacts with the environment, as well as the relative factors that influence their developmental processes. With the hope of responding to the above purposes, the researcher adopted narrative research method to interview three new immigrant children. The interviewees involved a junior high school student, a senior high school student as well as an adult. The researcher utilized a holistic-content perspective while analyzing the gathered information so as to allow the interviewees the right to tell their own stories. The researcher invited the interviewees to share their unique life experiences and subjective identity, at the same time, help built colorful new immigrant images and stories. By doing so, the new immigrant children told the stories how they changed the identity that the mainstream society placed upon them. The main findings are listed below:
1. The new immigrant children’s ethnic identity and family image
All three interviewees displayed a multi-dimensional, contextual, and flexible ethnic identity. The interviewees demonstrated how the mainstream prejudice and discrimination influenced their families, at the same time, showing how new immigrant families face mainstream society with toughness and vitality.
2. The influences that mainstream culture perspectives have on new immigrant families
While discussing how mainstream perspectives influence new immigrant families, it showed how the three interviewees’ families overthrow the disadvantaged family images through their emphasis on education and hard working. Nevertheless, it still showed the prejudice from mainstream culture directly influencing the ethnic identity of new immigrant children, forcing them to learn and to develop strategies that help cope with mainstream culture, including: a. Using a “Taiwanese” label along with the defférent strategy to strengthen their identity. b. Inherit their mothers’ ethnic attitude and coping strategies. c. Seeing academic performance expectation as an important ethnic identity.
3. The biracial identity new immigrant children hold influences their ethnic attitude, sense of belonging, and actions
The researcher found that the emotional experiences toward mainstream and non-mainstream culture will influence how individuals define two cultures’ relations and positions that belong to them. Such perspective is cultivated by both social mainstream perspectives as well as how the mothers see themselves in their family context. The position individuals find themselves in between the two cultures will determine whether the individuals hold a sense of belonging for their ethnic group, and whether the individuals take active actions.
4. Stages of ethnic identity development and the influencing factors
The three interviewees were in different ethnic identity developmental stages. While discussing the differences between different developmental stages, the researcher found that, aside from age differences, “background differences”, “attitudes families have toward ethnic identities”, “the friendliness of mainstream environment”, as well as “the multi-ethnic community environment” all influenced new immigrant children’s degree of maturation on ethnic identity developmental stages. These factors determined whether biracial children could find their own place and developed their multi-ethnic-identity in the social context.
Finally, the researcher discussed the research findings and gives suggestions to future researchers, new immigrant children, new immigrant families, as well as the educators.
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