%0 Journal Article
%T The Culture-Transmission Motive in Minorities: An Online Survey of Adolescents and Young Adults with an Immigrant Background in Germany
%A Irina Mchitarjan
%A Rainer Reisenzein
%J ISRN Education
%D 2013
%R 10.1155/2013/929058
%X Central assumptions of a theory of cultural transmission in minorities proposed by the authors were tested in an online survey of adolescents and young adults with Russian and Turkish immigrant background in Germany ( ). The results support most hypotheses. In particular, evidence was obtained for the existence of the culture-transmission motive postulated by the theory: the appreciation of the culture of origin and the desire to maintain it and pass it on to the next generation. In addition, evidence was obtained for the anchoring of the culture-transmission motive in more basic motives, its relative stability, and its motivating function for pedagogical activities and wishes regarding cultural transmission, including the wish for culture-specific education in public schools. 1. Introduction In recent years, in the wake of increasing international migration, the questions of how majority societies deal with linguistic and cultural, ethnic, and religious minorities and the related issue of cultural transmission in minorities have become focal topics of research in several branches of social science, including sociology, psychology, and educational science (e.g., [1¨C4]). Our interest in this paper is on the pedagogical aspects of cultural transmission in minorities: the educational activities of minorities in a foreign cultural environment and the policies of the majority towards them. Despite the importance of this topic, no theory specifically designed to explain cultural transmission in minorities has as yet been formulated. Instead, researchers have tried to apply existing theoretical frameworks, mostly taken from sociology, to explain the social phenomena in question; in particular, different versions of assimilation theory (e.g., [5¨C8]), transnationalism (e.g., [9]), and Bourdieu¡¯s [10] theory of cultural capital. However, in part simply because these theories were not originally developed to explain cultural transmission in minorities, they provide, in our view, only partial explanations. As an alternative, Mchitarjan and Reisenzein [11¨C13] recently proposed a theory of cultural transmission in minorities that is tailored to the social phenomena in question. This theory combines an action-theoretical model, adopted from sociology and social psychology, with a theory of the cultural evolution of groups, and fills in this theoretical framework with a number of specific assumptions about the motives and strategies of majorities and minorities in cultural transmission situations. A central assumption of the theory is that sociocultural groups have a
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.education/2013/929058/