1. Understanding cultural and ethnic identities
Chapter 4

2. Family and gender socialization
Identity means the reflective self-conception or self-image that we derive from family, gender, cultural, ethnic, and individual socialization processes (meaning through interaction with others).

3. Identities
Social identity can include cultural, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, social class, age, disability or professional identity; individuals in collectivistic cultures tend to be more concerned with this.
Personal identity can include any unique attributes that we associate with our individuated self in comparison with others; individualists tend to be more concerned with this.
Complete Know Thyself 4.1. p.86

4. Family types
Personal family system: democratic families that emphasize different family members as unique individuals; they foster individualist and small power distance value patterns.
Positional family system: often in collectivistic and larger power distance cultures, these families emphasize communal meanings, ascribed roles, and family rule conformity.
Table 4.1. p. 89

5. Gender socialization
Gender identity refers to the meanings and interpretations we hold concerning our self-images and expected other-images of femaleness and maleness.
Gender related behaviors are learned in the home, at school, and in childhood games.

6. Cultural identity
Cultural identity is the emotional significance that we attach to our sense of belonging or affiliation with the larger culture.
Cultural identity salience refers to the strength of affiliation we have with our larger culture.
More strongly we are influenced by larger cultural value patterns, the more we are likely to practice the norms and communication scripts of the dominant and mainstream culture.

7. Do you know:
How is national identity different from cultural identity?
National identity refers to one’s legal status in relation to statues, but cultural identity refers to the sentiments of belonging or connection to one’s larger culture.
Complete Know Thyself 4.2. p. 92

8. Ethnic identity conceptualization
Ethnic identity is “inherently a matter of ancestry, of beliefs about the origins of one’s borebears”; involves a subjective sense of belonging to or identification with an ethnic group across time. Ethnicity can be based on national origin, race, religion or language.
In U.S., ethnicity is based on countries from which their ancestors came.

9. Ethnicity
Ethnicity is basically an inheritance wherein members perceive each other as emotionally bounded by common set of traditions, worldview, history, heritage, and descent on a psychological and historical level.
Complete Know Thyself 4.3. p. 95

10. Follow up activity
Recall your dialogue with the partner for the Who Am I activity.
Identify one similarity and one difference between yourself and your partner that you learned when discussing your identities.
Also identify one insight (conclusion) you have learned by talking to your partner.
Turn this information in to me.

11. Activity “Who Am I?”
Purpose: To introduce students to multiple identities and to explore and understand your own identity and then understand other’s identities.
Time: 5 minutes to fill out the Who Am I sheet?
5-15 minutes to fill the Dialogue sheet.
15 minutes for discussion with another students.