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Interrogating the Links between Complex Social Identity Structures, Communicative Factors, and Psycho-Social Wellbeing in Multiethnic-Racial Populations in the United States and Canada
Abstract
Multiethnic and multiracial populations are among the fastest growing demographic groups in North America. Despite this fact, and a societal shift toward discussing race as a social construction, biological lay theories of race remain pervasive. Thus, those that are members of more than one ethnic-racial group face unique liminal identity experiences that monoethnic-racial individuals do not. In this dissertation I aim to explore these unique identity experiences, as well as their links to communication and wellbeing, through a lens of social identity complexity theorizing. In chapter one, I offer a brief history of miscegenation and amalgamation in North America to situate the study in the current sociocultural context. Following this, I review and synthesize research and theorizing on social identity complexity, multiethnic-racial identity, and the communicative factors that may affect the relationship between multiethnic-racial identity complexity and wellbeing. In chapter two I outline the methods, including procedures, measures, and analyses, which were used to answer my research questions. This dissertation employed a multimethod survey design including open-ended questions and scale items. In chapter three, I report the findings of the phronetic iterative qualitative analysis wherein I found five themes and seven subthemes surrounding multiethnic-racial individuals’ experiences having multiple ethnic-racial ingroup memberships. In chapter four I report the results of the quantitative analyses which estimated a number of multiple regression models to assess the relationships between multiethnic-racial identity complexity and wellbeing. Additionally, I estimated several moderation models to assess how the relationships between participants’ multiethnic-racial identity complexity and wellbeing was moderated by communicative factors. Finally, in chapter four I discuss the integration and interpretation of the qualitative and quantitative findings, outline major implications of the study, and report on limitations and directions for future research.
Subject Area
Communication|Ethnic studies|Social research
Recommended Citation
Cardwell, Megan E, "Interrogating the Links between Complex Social Identity Structures, Communicative Factors, and Psycho-Social Wellbeing in Multiethnic-Racial Populations in the United States and Canada" (2022). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI29215514.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI29215514