Influences of Intergenerational Transmission of Autobiographical Memories on Identity Formation in Immigrant Children
[Thesis]
Buquoi, Yuliya Illinichna
Isurin, Ludmila
The Ohio State University
2019
339
Ph.D.
The Ohio State University
2019
Our memories define the way we perceive our world; they help us think about the past, live our present, and construe our future. Memories also reflect a cultural way of being in the world that is inextricably linked to our identity construction, goals, and self-appraisal. Parents use intergenerational transmission of personal memories and family stories to help socialize their children into communities, rooted in worldviews, relationships, history, geography, and culture. This socialization helps them develop their own self-story, reflect on their past, shape their identities, and orient their future. This study investigated the relationship between identity and intergenerational transmission of memories through the platform of autobiographical memories shared by immigrant parents with their children. By virtue, the process of adaptation to a new way of life in a new country enables immigrants to renegotiate new identities, goals, and attitudes; however, this process is particularly important for immigrant children who have a multiple identities to blend into a hyphenated self-concept and relatively few tools for self-evaluation. Both the sociocultural environment of the host country as well as the transmission of cultural values and capital through parental interactions play important roles in shaping young immigrants' attitudes and behaviors. As a result, most immigrant children retain both their native and host cultures, but construct their own unique culture and hyphenated identity, lifestyle, and language. This dissertation examines how parental sharing of autobiographical memories with their children influences the children's identity in adulthood. It looks at children's data in three ways: first, within the context of transmission of sentiments, values, and ideals between parents and children in aggregate; second, focusing on intergenerational transmission within families, linking specific parents to their specific children; and third, through a comparative examination of whether there is a difference in sentiments between children who arrived either very young or were born shortly after immigration and those who arrived as older children or adolescents, having a more mature cognitive structure and a fair amount of their own memories from their native country. Since this was an exploratory study with a very broad scope, findings were not limited to one or two areas. Rather they told a story of a journey 32 Russian Jewish immigrant parents experienced in the course of going from a highly persecuted group in the former Soviet Union (FSU) to a successful diasporic group in the U.S., and how that journey was conveyed to and internalized by their 23 children. Findings centered on topics of children's identity negotiation, relationships with the FSU, U.S., and Israel, Judaism, and discrimination. Findings also addressed language attitudes, frequent topics of discussion parents and children engaged in with different subsets of interlocutors, prevailing themes in participant responses, comparative analysis of parent and child metrics in aggregate and within families, and an examination of worldview trends children exhibited by age at immigration. This study adopted a mixed-methods, interdisciplinary approach with a very broad scope, creating tangential ties to and generalizability in fields like developmental cognition, immigration, identity, autobiographical memory, history, social psychology, and diasporic Russian Jewish studies. It also helped forge a way forward in burgeoning topics of intergenerational transmission and Generation 1.5 identity negotiation; providing a few new data points into these young disciplines.