Adults’ Identity in Acculturation Settings: The Multigroup Ethnic & National Identity Measure (MENI)

ABSTRACT

European societies are facing great challenges not only in successfully integrating large numbers of culturally, linguistically, and religiously diverse immigrants structurally (e.g. into schools or the labor market), but also in fostering the construction of new identities and preserving social cohesion. In this context, it is crucial to understand the commitment people feel to a cultural environment and the way in which such commitment develops, particularly in new cultural settings. However, there is a lack of research on identity development among adult immigrants and natives and a lack of suitable measurement instruments. To address this, we adapted the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure–Revised (MEIM–R) for application to immigrant and native adult populations and extended it to measure also national identity. Our aim in the present study was to test the psychometric properties of this new Multigroup Ethnic & National Identity Measure (MENI) in a representative sample (N = 3410) of immigrant and native adults (aged 20–72 years) in a European context, namely Germany. Results based on confirmatory factor analyses support a two-factor structure (commitment and exploration) for MENI and confirm scalar invariance across both the immigrant and native adult populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure–Revised (MEIM–R)
• Multigroup Ethnic & National Identity Measure (MENI)
• identity scale
• immigrant
• adults
• acculturation

Acknowledgments

The data used have been provided by GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. The cognitive pretesting of the identity items was part of a pretesting request commissioned by the PIAAC-L project (funding: Federal Ministry of Education and Research, grant number 01JP1301 A, B,C).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [01JP1301 A, B,C].