Acculturation and suicidal behavior in college students

A study of 407 college and university students found that African American students reported higher levels of acculturative stress than did European Americans. However, for both groups, acculturative stress was associated with feelings of hopelessness and with suicidal ideation. The associations were replicated in a sample of Turkish students. Acculturative stress, therefore, may be present in college students of all ethnic groups and contribute to poor mental health. Acculturative stress occurs typically when individuals experience conflict between their culture of origin and the culture into which they have moved. Acculturative stress occurs when people emigrate from one culture to another, thereby moving from being in a dominant culture in their country of origin to being in a minority culture in their new country. Acculturative stress can also occur when people move from one subculture into another within their own country. A great of research in the United States has focused on acculturation by ethnic groups, such as that experienced by African Americans as they move into the larger culture (Landrine & Klonoff, 1996) but acculturative stress can also occur as a result of movements from one social class into another as well as movement into subcultures defined by education and gender. Acculturative stress has an impact on mental health, including depression and suicidal behavior (Hovey, 2000) substance abuse (Neffe & Hope, 1992), and eating disorders (Perez, Voelz, Pettit & Joiner, 2002). For example, Walker, Wingate, Obasi and Joiner (2008) found that acculturative stress was positively associated with suicidal ideation for African American college students and contributed, along with depression scores, to the prediction of suicidal ideation. However, in that study, acculturative stress was also associated with suicidal ideation for European American students, although less strongly (r = 0.19 versus 0.29) but it did not contribute to the predication of suicidal ideation when combined with depression scores in a multiple regression. Interestingly, in that study, African American and European American college students obtained similar average scores on a measure of acculturative stress (13.24 versus 13.17). The present paper presents the results from a new study of acculturative stress and suicidal ideation for African American and European American college students in order to examine the relevance of acculturative stress in predicting suicidal ideation for these two groups.