Adolescents and deviance in a Vietnamese American community: A theoretical synthesis

This article uses qualitative data from fieldwork in a Vietnamese American community to identify sources of deviant group membership among Vietnamese American adolescents. It finds that the deviant group membership of these adolescents may be accounted for by a synthesis of three of the major theoretical explanations of deviant behavior. The primary source of deviant group membership among these young people is a failure to integrate them, through their families, into their own ethnic community and into the larger American society. Three major types of families that fail to achieve these types of social integration are described. Young people who have not been socially integrated effectively engage in a process of social learning in which they acquire traits and attitudes of an age‐segregated youth society. They are then labeled as “undesirables” by the Vietnamese community, as they fail to conform to the shared expectations of Vietnamese American adults. These expectations, it is maintained, are the products of an ethnic identity created by the process of immigrant resettlement.