Cultural Life Scripts: Does Immigration Lead to Observing Life Through Different Cultural Lenses?

Abstract

Cultural life scripts are shared semantic knowledge and expectations about the temporal order and timing of major life events in a prototypical life course in a given culture. Previous studies exploring the relationship between immigration and cultural life scripts found that immigration is a significant shift that often involves an adjustment to a new cultural context – which ultimately may change people’s views about a normative life course. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how different immigration generations within the same family may affect how one perceives life through a different cultural lens. This present research investigates whether young second-generation Korean Americans, their parent first-generation South Korean immigrants, young Americans with American-born parents, and those American parents observe life through different cultural life scripts by examining the life scripts of second-generation Korean American undergraduates at Princeton University, the actual parents of those students who are first-generation South Korean immigrants, American-born undergraduates with American-born parents, and those actual American-born parents as well. Building on a framework about the developmental dependence of identity formation, it is predicted that first-generation South Korean immigrants, despite being enculturated in the American culture, draw closer to their original culture, and will report a less common life script than the American parent participant group. Further, second-generation Korean Americans will draw closer to American culture than their parent’s original culture, thus, reporting a more common life script with the American participant group. Also, it is predicted that all four participant groups would report life script events that are mostly positive and expected to occur in early adulthood. The results were unable to fully observe whether all four sample groups had differing life scripts because the data did not prove significance.