Acculturation as a Situated Transactional Process
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Acculturation research commonly links broad preferences for heritage-culture maintenance and participation in the receiving society to psychological and sociocultural adjustment. Yet meta-analytic and longitudinal evidence shows that these associations are often weak, heterogeneous, and limited over time, suggesting that broad preferences alone cannot explain why cultural engagement leads to different outcomes across situations. This conceptual article develops a situated transactional framework within a broader complex dynamic systems account. Building on established work showing that acculturation is contextual, domain-specific, and interactional, the framework specifies how these influences come together within concrete encounters. It proposes a process in which locally relevant conditions shape appraisal, the mobilization of culturally patterned resources, response, relational and institutional reception, multidimensional outcomes, and feedback into later encounters. The article also distinguishes the adaptation process, understood as the continuing person-environment transaction, from adaptation outcomes, including psychological, sociocultural, relational, and externally observed consequences. By organizing these elements into an explicit recursive architecture, the framework generates testable predictions about context-specific responses, reception, multidimensional outcomes, learned response patterns, and structural change. It thereby provides a concrete empirical agenda for testing whether these mechanisms improve explanation and prediction beyond broad-orientation and contextual-moderation accounts.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Author: Ceren Su Abacioglu
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213502763