Patterns of minority and majority identification in a multicultural society

Abstract

There has been increasing investigation of the national and ethnic identification of minority populations in Western societies and how far they raise questions about the success or failure of multicultural societies. Much of the political and academic discussion has, however, been premised on two assumptions. First, that ethnic minority and national identification are mutually exclusive, and, second, that national identification forms an overarching majority identity that represents consensus values. In this paper, using a large-scale nationally representative UK survey with a varied set of identity questions, and drawing on an extension of Berry's acculturation framework, we empirically test these two assumptions. We find that, among minorities, strong British national and minority identities often coincide and are not on an opposing axis. We also find that adherence to a British national identity shows cleavages within the white majority population. We further identify variation in these patterns by generation and political orientation.

Keywords:

• identity
• UK
• British
• ethno-religious group
• acculturation
• second generation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Simon Burgess, Stephen Jivraj, Stephanie McFall and Ayse Uskul for helpful comments on an earlier draft. We would also like to thank participants at the BSPS September 2013 conference, Swansea, the Norface Migration Conference, Berlin 2013, the Research Methods Festival, Oxford 2012, and seminars at INED, Paris, 2013, Institute of Education, London 2012 for their feedback on earlier versions of the paper. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the valuable comments and suggestions from two anonymous referees and the journal editor.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1077986.

Notes

1. More detailed information on the construction of this variable is available on request.

2. Given the focus on those who identified as White majority, the number born outside the UK was relatively small, around 2% of this sample.

3. We tried an alternative definition of strong and weak identification: using scores of 6 and above on the 11-point scale to represent strong identification. More than 50% of individuals choose scores that are greater than the mid-point of the scale and, as a result, when we used this alternative definition, the number of people categorised as having a strong identification with their parents’ ethnic group increased by 11 percentage points and those having a strong identification with British identity increased by 17 percentage points. The resulting distribution of acculturation identities according to Berry's framework is shown in the supplemental material (Appendix: Figure A1). While using this alternative definition may be beneficial for future international comparisons based on identity ratings, it does not have the nice interpretation of the median cut-off for this paper, which illustrates how far from a random distribution of responses, respondents’ identity choices are.

4. We also interact this with an ethnic minority dummy variable and find that both this result holds for both the White majority and ethnic minorities; but the difference across educational groups (tertiary vs others) is higher among the White majority than ethnic minorities (see Appendix: Table A2).

5. Results based on the model using the alternative definition of strength of identification showed that the pattern remained almost the same, even though the exact proportions differed (see Appendix: Table A3). An exception was that the probability of choosing a marginalized identity vis-a-vis a separated identity did not differ across different political affiliations.

Additional information

ALITA NANDI is Research Fellow in the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University.

ADDRESS: ISER, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 4SQ, UK. Email: [email protected]

LUCINDA PLATT is Professor in the Department of Social Policy at the LSE.

ADDRESS: Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: [email protected]