African American Acculturation Essay

Psychological distress, acculturation, and help-seeking attitudes were all measured using specific indexes and scales set for the point of interest. The hypotheses of this research was that even within the African American community, one would find disparities in the treatment of psychological issues – just based on the method of acculturation used, and their views on society. There are 4 basic modes of acculturation: traditionalist, assimilationist, integrationist, and marginalist. It is thought that the integrationist acculturation strategy is the best for optimizing and maximizing well-being. Although there is not a difference in the number of African Americans that have mental health problems when compared to European-Americans, the percentage of those who seek professional mental health services due to emotional distress is representatively lower. The rate at which African Americans receive psychological help services is half as much as that of European Americans – there is a need for an explanation of that statistic. The goal of this paper is to determine the reasoning behind the help-seeking disparities in African Americans and the field of psychological health. In order to make health services fair, we must first understand the reasoning behind why or why not one would seek out professional help in the first place. Understanding ethno cultural attitudes and other cultural variables will allow the health care field to better relate and help all people more uniformly and to the best of their needs.
The general purpose of this study was to find out how attitudes and acculturation processes of people of African American descent impacted their willingness and attitudes toward receiving psychological help. While this was a broa...

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...being able to analyze this data, due to the fact that there are contradictions in the types of data being collected. There were several other limitations that were outlined by the authors at the end of the article. Since there were two different populations of participants from which data was collected, it was hard to control environmental factors such as the way the information was received and the two different regions in which the participants were from. Budget constraints were another limitation to this study, as one must entice participants in some way or another, and it was difficult to find participants who were willing to participate for little compensation. Finally, this data set was from one single survey of participants, so there was no way to determine the effects of time in the changing attitudes or psychological distress over a longer period of time.