The development and validation of a Chinese American affiliation scale

As the United States becomes increasingly multi-cultural, acculturation among different immigrant groups offers an exciting and useful research context due to its significant impact on consumer behavior. Acculturation has two dimensions: affiliation with the original culture and affiliation with the new culture. Extant literature treats them either as unidimensional (one increasing or decreasing at the expense of the other) or bi-dimensional (the two are separate). Further, past research has developed scales with one sub-culture and applied them with minor modifications to other cultures, without reflecting the internally experienced and externally expressed aspects of cultural heritage. To address these gaps, this study proposes that affiliation to home culture be examined in specific immigrant groups, separately from affiliation with the host culture, considering both internal and external aspects of culture. Through multiple rounds of qualitative and quantitative studies, this research develops a Chinese American Affiliation (CAA) scale and validates it within a nomological net comprised of CAA, Cosmopolitanism, Age, Generation Status, and Ethnic Identity.