Negotiating Identity and Pragmatism: Parental Treatment of International Adoptees' Birth Culture Names

Abstract

The current study advances the extant literature on how internal boundary management processes (naming, discussing, narrating, ritualizing) impact identity by demonstrating how naming fosters identity in the context of international adoption. The study examined: (a) parental treatment of their children's birth country names in the naming process and (b) parental motives for various naming forms (i.e., placement of the child's birth culture name within the full name). Focus groups were conducted with 32 U.S. White American parents with an adopted child from either China or Vietnam. Results present a catalog of four international adoptee naming forms, with parents choosing to retain, alter, create a new, or exclude the birth culture name. Parents were found to appeal to two primary motivations—identity and pragmatism—to justify and explain these differing naming forms. This study found that naming promoted three identity source domains: family identity, ethnic identity, and individual identity.