A tale of two cultural life scripts: do young second-generation Turkish immigrants versus young Danes in Denmark perceive life through different cultural lenses?

ABSTRACT

Cultural life scripts refer to the shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course within a given culture or subculture. Immigration is a significant transition that often implies a change in cultural context, which may change people's views about a normative life. However, research on cultural life scripts in the context of immigration has been limited. We addressed this gap by examining the cultural life scripts of 33 young second-generation Turkish immigrants and 33 young Danes in Denmark, pairwise-matched on age, gender, and education, along with their subjective well-being and acculturation level. Both groups reported mostly positive life script events expected to occur in early adulthood and their individual life scripts generally had a positive outlook. In contrast to earlier studies, we found no evidence of lower subjective well-being or greater normativity of the cultural life script in the immigrant group. Moreover, the acculturation level of the Turkish group correlated positively with their subjective well-being, suggesting that adapting at least to some degree to the daily life of the host country is associated with well-being of second-generation immigrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural life script
• immigration
• normativity
• subjective well-being
• acculturation

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Carlsberg Foundation for an individual postdoctoral grant to the first author (CF17-0859) and the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF89) for funding. Further, we thank student research assistants Sarah Jakobsen, Bengisu Karabiber, and Mesud Sarmanlu for their meticulous work during data collection and data coding. Special thanks to Evrim Citirikkaya, Heidi Eskegaard Jensen, and Ali Tekcan for their help with the recruitment of Turkish and Danish participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We would like to emphasise that our focus here is on the descendants. Throughout the article, we use the terms the second-generation Turkish immigrants, the Turkish participants, the Turkish group, or Turks interchangeably when referring to this group. However, as described in detail, we only recruited people with Turkish roots who were born and raised in Denmark, and who are officially called second-generation Turkish immigrants in Denmark.

2 Both Berntsen and Rubin (2004) and Erdoğan et al. (2008) created CLS categories, if the frequency of mention of an event exceeded three times in the data. Researchers used other times a 4% rule, i.e., they created CLS categories, if at least 4% of participants in the sample mentioned an event (e.g., Hatiboğlu & Habermas, 2016). Here, we decided to use the original “4 times” rule, which is more stringent for our sample.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the Carlsberg Foundation for an individual postdoctoral grant to the first author (CF17-0859) and the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF89) for funding.