| Chapter 2: | Asian American Identity: A Review |
These are important aspects that clinicians must think about when counseling their newer immigrant clientele, and are also important aspects to consider when developing theoretical frameworks and empirical measures to study racial and ethnic-specific identity in general.
Around the time that Sue and Sue (1990) developed the R/CID, an empirical measure was also developed to understand the specific issues that pertain to Asian Americans. The Suinn-Lew Asian Self Identity Acculturation scale (SL-ASIA; Suinn et al., 1987, 1992) was developed to assess an individual’s adoption of European American values and retention of Asian values. To date, the SL-ASIA is the most widely used measure of ethnic identity in Asian American college students (Lee & Yoo, 2004; Leong & Chou, 1994; Leong & Tata, 1990). The researchers’ goals with this measure were to better capture an individual’s identification with her own culture versus her identification with the host culture, and to determine whether acculturation was related to other similar constructs such as cultural identity and friendship choice. However, Suinn and colleagues did not make clear distinctions between cultural identity and acculturation. They assumed that the constructs would be related, and did not clearly define the difference between a strong Asian identification versus a more Western identification. For instance, does an individual who is less acculturated (more Asian identified) necessarily disidentify with a Western or American identity?
Other researchers have noted the limitations of the literature in general (Lee et al., 2001) due to the fact that the practices of researchers have led to the lack of conceptual clarity in the literature regarding the distinction between acculturation and ethnic identity. Lee and colleagues note that many studies (e.g., Hong & Min, 1999; Hurh & Kim, 1984; Noh & Avison, 1996) have primarily examined ethnic identity through certain behavioral indicators, such as language fluency, ethnic affiliations, association with ethnic friends, and reading ethnic newspapers.