A Psychology of Economic Migration

Abstract

This article introduces a psychology of economic immigration as a field complementary to but separate from research on acculturation. A theoretical model of psychological disharmony is outlined, where hard work and thrift become the crucial elements of immigrant condition. Three studies are reported. Studies 1 and 2 were conducted among Polish immigrants in Ireland. These studies addressed personality comparisons between immigrants and nonimmigrant samples (Study 1: peer observations) and immigrant self-perceived changes (Study 2). Adaptive personality changes did occur as hypothesized, particularly in the domain of conscientiousness, which regulates work-related activities. This finding was restricted in Study 2 to a prospective time frame (change measured with time flow). Study 2 introduced four lifestyles: eudaimonia, hedonism, self-sacrifice, and alienation. Prospective change in conscientiousness favored eudaimonic lifestyle, but retrospective change predicted self-sacrifice. Participants in Study 3 were Eastern Slav and Vietnamese immigrants in Poland. Based on previous work on Confucian work dynamism, it was expected that Vietnamese would demonstrate greater work involvement, eudaimonic lifestyle, and thrift, compared to Slav immigrants. These hypotheses were confirmed, showing that within the general model of immigrant adaptation, there is room for cultural differences.

Keywords

immigration personality change life-styles thrift–extravagance subjective well-being Confucian morality Poles and Slav people Vietnamese

We come to live here for the purpose of earning your money (PLN) and not to learn your language (Polish).

Igwe Nwamana, a Nigerian immigrant to Poland, writer, author of Stadium: Devil’s Games

Life here in Australia is good, that is—money is good.

But people here are not that good, women drink too much.

Kamaljeet Kaur, a Punjabi immigrant, formerly a university graduate in information systems, currently a taxi driver

According to the dominant view, psychological acculturation is the main goal for all categories of people, who have relocated, for a relatively long period of time, to a country different from where they were born and previously resided (see Berry, 2006a; Van Oudenhoven, 2006). The main thrust of this article is to challenge this outlook by demonstrating the strategic importance of work- and money-related behaviors among economic migrants.

Acculturation and Immigration: Culture Learning vs. Money Earning

In continuation of the two prologues, consider the following report on seasonal migration workers between two European countries:

A majority of Poles in the Netherlands are seasonal immigrants, employed for 26 weeks (which is the limit for phase A immigrant employment). They are totally dependent on sending agencies they signed contracts with. They remain totally isolated from the Dutch community, and they lack communication skills. They do not feel any need for integration either, because they are engulfed with other Poles, 10 persons per room. They come to plant tulips, spending all day in greenhouses, strawberry and tulip fields, or at construction sites. And, when leaving work places they become rowdy—says Dr. Jaco Dagevos, from the Education and Minorities Division at Netherlands Institute for Social Research. Poles are known in our country for their hard work at jobs which a typical Dutch person would not desire. And when you work that hard, then you act out during the weekend. (Pawłowska-Salińska, 2012, pp. 28-29)

At the opposite end of the spectrum characterizing life in a foreign country, we find quite a different story:

In the present study, we sought to investigate the temporal course and predictors of acculturative stress and self-esteem by means of a panel data design. […] All sojourners were Belgian students participating in a one year overseas exchange program with AFS Intercultural Programs. AFS is an international NGO providing intercultural exchange opportunities. During the sojourn, participants typically stay with a host family and are enrolled in full-time education in a local school. AFS is particularly renowned for its level of support to both exchange students and host families. (Geeraert & Demoulin, in press)

The first quotation emphasizes the work aspects of economic immigrant conditions, whereas immersion and education of young sojourners is the essence of the second question. Yet both types of these contrasting sociopsychological conditions are covered by the same domain of cross-cultural research, called acculturation, studied with the same conceptual and measurement tools (see Berry, 2006b).

The term acculturation is conceived in this article as a process whereby new skills, competencies, and ways of being (values) necessary to becoming a functional member of a receiving society are acquired by an incoming individual to the limits set involuntarily by his/her former programming within the culture of origin and voluntarily, in line with self-articulated preferences or other-imposed norms (Boski, 2010). An example of involuntary factors are phonemic or syntax differences, which set the limits for acquisition of second language. Value differences may voluntarily forestall behaving like locals in many daily activities.

In-depth acculturation is a prerequisite for acquiring important positions in the new society (e.g., a teacher), or it may become an intrinsic task for itself. There are many positions in the receiving society, however, for which minimal acculturation is sufficient to meet the job requirements. Immigrants are ready and expected to assume such positions. Thus, rather than pursuing the acculturation paradigm (Berry, 2006a; Van Oudenhoven, 2006), a homo faber or homo œconomicus model of immigrant is proposed instead. The driving force for economic immigrants is to escape poverty, to overcome unemployment, to improve their personal living conditions, and to help their families at large. Also, the stress they experience, especially during the early periods of their migratory life, is likely to be socioeconomic, not cultural (Berry, 2006b). Finding, keeping, and losing jobs; physical effort; managing financial resources; and survival in unstable conditions all become stressors in the immigrant life.

There is no suggestion in this article that questions about culture maintenance and acquisition are irrelevant for immigrants. But it seems more realistic to assume that their immediate preoccupations concern a different set of questions: strategies of legalizing their status in the receiving country, finding and securing short-term jobs, and planning long-term careers; financial decisions on spending, remitting, saving, and borrowing money; managing family life in both countries; and so forth. With this line of reasoning, acculturation is at first instrumental or subsidiary to striving for economic goals. It may gain in importance with time, after strategic decisions of settling down permanently in the new country have been made.

For a systematic comparison between psychology of acculturation and of economic migration, please consult Table 1.

Table 1.

Educational Sojourners vs. Economic Immigrants: A Comparison Between Learn and Earn.

Domains of Comparison	Educational Sojourners	Economic Immigrants
Priority goal for relocation	Acculturation: Learning and acquiring competences in second culture	Improvement of material standards of living
Selection of a host country	Personal preferences for language or other aspects of its past/present culture	Based on economic considerations: ease at legalization and realistic prospects for work and pay
Stay/sojourn organization	Usually based on bi-lateral agreements between countries and institutions	Often spontaneous individual decisions; sometimes family-sponsored or agency services; illegal immigration
Work for pay	Minimal; unwanted or contrary to the conditions of sojourn	Central goal for leaving home country and settling down in host country
Lifestyle	Demanding but enjoyable due to cognitive activities and progress in skill acquisition	Hard work to maximize earnings and thrift to maximize savings
Social contacts	Often with local majority members, facilitated by immersion programs	Usually within home country in-group; isolation from local majority
Second language acquisition	Central, usually mastered and practiced in second language courses	Online: Instrumental to job and communication requirements
Interest in host culture	Of intrinsic value; explorations and growing understanding	Indifference; time, energy, or financial limitations
Acculturation: culture learning	Intentional learning, central processing, feedback, and expert control	Often incidental, peripheral to other activities; trial-and-error, or social imitation
Short time duration	Semester students, learners of gradually advanced courses	Seasonal/returning workers
Longer time duration	Full-time international students, permanent residents, or visitors	Permanent/naturalized immigrants

Psychology of Immigration: Toward a Model of Psychological Disharmony

Priority goals in economic migrant condition

Economic immigrants usually come from countries where material standards of living and technological advancement are much lower than those in the receiving countries.

Certain low-skill jobs are prominent among immigrants universally; construction workers, fruit/vegetable pickers, and domestic helpers are examples. For others, their premigration education and skills are unlikely to meet the requirements that would guarantee equivalent jobs in technologically advanced societies. Thus, meeting priority goals of economic improvement becomes an extremely demanding task. It may start with acceptance of any job offers. Gradual advancement becomes possible, but its channels are narrow with social-psychological costs set high.

In contrast, expatriates relocate from more to less economically and technologically advanced countries, to advance local development with their expertise. Expatriate migration may occur between countries of similar developmental levels as is the case in Tabor and Milfont’s (2011) study on British participants moving to New Zealand.

Based on these premises, we expect the following:

Immigrants start their employment at low-skilled jobs and often as overskilled and underpaid workers.

Immigrants compensate their low per-hour wages by working extra hours.

Immigrants, who suffer initial status loss, may gradually regain it with extra effort (e.g., retaking degree studies or skill upgrading courses).

Immigrants’ economic behaviors are characterized by maximizing savings for delayed gratifications and by exercising thrift at current expenses.

Psychological disharmony and economic migrant’s stress

Human life activities split into several major domains: work (school education), managing family/household tasks, social/societal activities, rest, and leisure (pleasure) (see also Arends-Toth, 2003; Navas et al., 2005). When these public and private domains complement each other and remain in a relative balance, we can call it psychological harmony. Harmony occurs in cycles ranging from circadian, to weekly, monthly, and even annual rhythms. Harmony is important for physical, psychological, and sociocultural well-being. By contrast, the life of economic migrants is characterized by disharmony (Boski, 2009, chapter13; Boski, 2010).

The two main axes of disharmony are (a) excessive amount of work activity and (b) deficits in psychosocial bonds and in cultural-societal activities. Both result in stress. Stress (or cultural shock) is one of the most researched problems in the domain of acculturation (Berry, 2006b; Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001). Though the existing scales of stress are culture free, it is generally assumed that immigrants’ elevated scores reflect psychophysical costs of living between two cultures. To balance the picture, it is proposed that stress originates also from the following factors in economic migrants’ condition:

physical effort, exhaustion, and neglect of health due to financial and/or legal-organizational reasons;

short-term instability: uncertainty of legal and financial status, changing accommodation, jobs, community of residence, and fluid acquaintances;

long-term uncertainty of meeting self-imposed goals and others’ expectations of financial success; and

worries and nostalgic separation from the fabric of intimate relationships.

Immigrant life styles

To reach their priority goals, immigrants should attempt at maximizing their savings by working the maximum level at any job available and by trimming their current expenses. This lifestyle is called self-sacrifice.

Immigrant self-sacrifice bears resemblance to Inglehart’s survival values (Inglehart & Oyserman, 2004), yet it has a component of hope that the current hardship will bring rewards later in life. Self-sacrifice has two conceptual opposites, which constitute the field of subjective well-being and happiness. One of them is hedonism, and the other is eudaimonia (Ryan & Deci, 2001; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Waterman, 1993). Hedonism is a here-and-now activity or state experienced as intrinsically pleasurable. Eudaimonia places positive value on current activities as meaningful, interesting, enthralling tasks and on personal success and progress/improvement as delayed gratifications for such activities. In hedonism, pleasures become the guiding principles of life; in eudaimonia, cultivation of personal virtues assumes such function.

The last lifestyle is called alienation: here an individual finds no sense, purpose, nor pleasure in his or her life. The taxonomy of four lifestyles is illustrated in Table 2.¹

As already asserted:

Self-sacrifice should be the dominant lifestyle among economic migrants.

Bouts of hedonism may coexist as a complementary lifestyle, especially among young and single immigrants.

Eudaimonia is expected to be high among sojourners and those immigrants who have lifted themselves up to the level of aspired and highly qualified jobs.

Table 2.

Taxonomy of life-styles (applied to economic migrant’s condition).

	Intrinsic (Autonomous) Satisfaction With an Activity
Delayed Gratification	High	Low
High (future orientation)	Eudaimonia	Self-sacrifice
	Work as challenge, chance for growth, flow experience	Hard work, effort. Lacking self-fulfillment but obtaining means for improving life conditions
Low (here-and-now orientation)	Hedonism Pleasure, enjoyment, relaxed lifestyle	Alienation Lack of sense and meaning in one’s life

Coping fitness

To cope successfully with stressors, candidates for immigrants are self-recruited from selected demographic and psychological categories. Over centuries they have been invariably young male adults, often single. While gender is today more evenly distributed among immigrants, other characteristics remain valid:

young, physically strong, and fit, so that health problems would not obstruct work activities nor sustain unwanted costs;

psychological profile of endurance, hardiness, strong long-term motivation, short-term flexibility, and optimist outlook; and

ability for emotional detachment, self-reliance, and autonomy (see Ward et al., 2001).

Cultural factors

Our analysis has so far concentrated on psychological aspects of economic immigration that appear universal. Cultural aspects of economic migration should be demonstrated though, to legitimize a presence of this research field in cross-cultural psychology. These cultural aspects are observed at five levels:

Economic migration takes place from poor and disadvantaged to relatively well-to-do economies. Since the economic status of various countries changes over time, directions of migratory flow also change.

Freedom to move from sending and to receiving countries (see Thomas & Znaniecki, 1958, for a century-old analysis). In our times, a similar process took place after 10 new states joined the European Union in 2004, and the United Kingdom and Ireland were first to lift work restrictions for the relatively poor members of the community.

Attractiveness at the host-country market. In the food domain, Chinese, Indian, Turkish, or Italian cuisines come as examples. Demand for restaurants representing these national cuisines runs high.

Historical common fate and cultural distance. Immigration is not random. Maghrebians are the largest immigrant minority in France; Hindu and Pakistanis in United Kingdom; Surimamese, Antillans, and Indonesians in the Netherlands; and so forth.

Cultural fitness to assume the role of immigrant. When work ethics and self-discipline are highly embedded in their culture of origin, individuals from such regions may find it easier to assume the role of immigrants and may also enjoy preferred status by the hosts, as hardworking and not problematic. Eastern Asians are an example of this category.

The present studies: An overview

The psychological model of economic migration generates a number of theoretical derivations, which were presented at each of the five headings discussed above. They are too numerous to be covered empirically in one research article. The three studies that will be presented in the next sections verify the crucial hypothesis about centrality of work, work-related lifestyles, thrift, and their relationship with subjective well-being among various immigrant samples.

In Study 1, peer ratings were used to compare work-related personality dimensions among Polish immigrants in Ireland, their compatriots in Poland, and Irish citizens. Social interactions between peer observers and actors were also measured. Study 2 explored dynamics in conscientiousness and in other personality dimensions, by comparing self-reported changes from premigration period in Poland to their current situation in Ireland. Immigrant lifestyles were investigated and related to the former variables. Study 3 compared Eastern Slav and Vietnamese immigrants in Poland on their work orientation, lifestyles, thrift orientation, and life satisfaction.

Studies 1 and 2

Historical and Cultural Background

On May 1, 2004, 10 new countries entered the European Union. That date marked also the starting point of a massive immigration to those old European Union countries, which decided to open their job markets to the new member states in the East. The United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland were the first to lift up restrictions. Poles, the most populous among the newly admitted nations, responded vigorously. It is estimated (Grabowska-Lusińska & Okólski, 2009) that in 5 years, 2004 to 2008, about 1.5 million Poles left their country and settled down in old European Union member states, predominantly the British Isles. In Ireland alone, Poles accounted for 10% of population and became the largest ethnic minority overnight. That migration process was predominantly spontaneous (not organized by agencies) and carried out by young people (80% below 35 years of age).

This remarkable process set off multiple consequences on both sides of the migratory tides. Films, popular serials on TV (e.g., The Londoners presented in Polish TV from 2008 to 2010), political programs, and electoral campaigns for migrants, Internet sites, conferences, studies in social sciences, and published books all testify to its importance in public discourse.² Economic consequences of this massive immigration are also impressive. During the 7-year membership in the European Union, bank transfers by these postaccess immigrants back to Poland were worth 110.2 billion PLN (28 billion Euro). The size of remittances from immigrants to their families is about equal to European Union budget transfers for Poland’s regional development programs.

Ireland and Poland are distinctly Roman Catholic, and religion is important in both countries. Ireland and the United Kingdom belong to the top individualistic cultures on Hofstede (2001) measures. Irish score high on extraversion, while Poles’ personality profile is low on extraversion and high on neuroticism (McCrae et al., 2005). Finally, cultural individualism and extraversion at the level of citizen scores are highly correlated (Hofstede & McCrae, 2004). These results define the context for Polish immigration.

Peer-Rated Personality and Social Contacts (Study 1)

The Big-Five model has become popular in cross-cultural research on personality (Allik & McCrae, 2004; McCrae et al., 2005). Since two of its dimensions are convergent with our theoretical framework, the model was adopted to serve as a measurement tool in this study.

Conscientiousness corresponds closely to hard work and self-discipline. Being ready to work (“on call”), responsible, and reliable are the dispositions helping to secure jobs on a fragile immigrant market. Agreeableness is also adaptive when a person is about to start his or her new social life at a very low status. Being friendly, noncontroversial, avoiding conflicts, accepting modest offers, and staying out of trouble may be recommended to immigrants as a survival strategy.

Accordingly, Ward, Leong, and Low (2004) found that Australian expatriates scored above host Singaporeans on conscientiousness and on agreeableness and also above their compatriots in Australia. This incremental pattern among migrants versus sedentary samples was not repeated with the Singaporean group though. Ward et al. (2004) formulated their predictions within the acculturation framework, guided by culture fit hypothesis.

The hypotheses in the present study are specific for the condition of economic migration and contrary to acculturation framework, which predicts immigrants will follow work practices of the two cultures involved.

Hypothesis 1: It is expected that conscientiousness should be higher among Polish economic migrants in Ireland than among Poles residing in their home country and majority citizens in the host country.

Likewise:

Hypothesis 2: Agreeableness attributable to Polish immigrants should surpass the scores attributed to Poles and Irish nationals in their respective countries.

Though functional for meeting their goals, hard-work orientation should restrict the range of social contacts, which are instrumental for integration to the majority culture. Thus:

Hypothesis 3: The higher the conscientiousness attributable to immigrants by their peers, the lower their standings in social contacts with local mates.

Method

Participants

Three categories of individuals served as participants-observers; they were as follows:

(a) 99 Poles in Poland (51% women): 49 weekend university students in the city of Bydgoszcz, 30 employees of the Gdansk Education Publishing House, and 20 employees of the Gdansk Petroelum LOTOS;

(b) 96 Polish immigrants from Irish cities of Limerick and Shannon (47% women); and

Polish and Irish participants in Ireland were employed mainly in industrial zones and in services. Twenty-five individuals (14%) of both nationalities in Ireland had university education and worked in the computer industry or at management positions. Others worked as industrial laborers, salespersons, and so forth.

Design

Peer ratings served as a measurement technique. This method is present in the literature (McCrae et al., 2005), and it also corresponds closely to stereotypes held about immigrants by local majorities. It is widely believed on the British Isles that Poles are hard working people; likewise for Vietnamese in Poland.

Since we were interested in comparing immigrants with permanent residents in both countries, it was not necessary to use a full three factorial design with actors and observers from both nationalities residing in each country. Instead of eight, we had only three conditions: (a) Polish_Obs. → Polish_Act. in Poland; (b) Irish_Obs. → Polish_Act. in Ireland; and (c) Polish_Obs. → Irish_Act. in Ireland. Comparing personality scores (on conscientiousness and agreeableness) between Polish migrants versus Poles and Irish citizens in both countries should give us answers on hypothetical changes due to immigration.

Actors–observers

Participants were selected on grounds of their readiness to describe a colleague/coworker about whom they knew well enough to answer questions. The consent of that other person (actor) was not sought for, nor was he or she aware of being the target of someone’s observation. Mean ages for observers (O) and actors (A), respectively, were (a) in Poland, ${\bar{X}}_{O}$ = 30.93 and ${\bar{X}}_{A}$ = 33.09; (b) in Ireland, ${\bar{X}}_{Ir_O}$ = 29.12 and ${\bar{X}}_{P1_A}$ = 29.06; and (c) in Ireland, ${\bar{X}}_{P1_O}$ = 32.11 and ${\bar{X}}_{Ir_A}$ = 32.61. There were no significant age differences among the three categories of observers. With the difference of 4 to 3.5 years, Polish immigrant actors were younger than the two remaining categories. Yet the actor’s exact age was only estimated by observers.

Participants in Poland reported much longer periods of their acquaintanceship with actors than the pairs in Ireland did: ${\bar{X}}_{P1}$ = 66.16 months, compared to ${\bar{X}}_{Ir \to P1}$ = 20.42 and ${\bar{X}}_{P1 \to Ir}$ = 15.39, F(2, 274) = 34.38, p < .001. Nevertheless, a criterion of 1 year dyadic interaction was met, justifying appropriateness of the peer-rating procedure.

Measures

Instrument: International Personality Item Pool (IPIP)

An observer lacks access to the actor’s introspective states, which has consequences for the format of peer-ratings technique. The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R), the most popular inventory in the field, holds many items phrased introspectively, which makes it difficult to use by external observers.³ Indeed, it was rejected after a pilot study. The IPIP (Goldberg, 1990; Goldberg, Johnson, Eber, Ashton, & Gough, 2006) provides a more behavioral pool from which item samples can be drawn according to the researcher’s needs. The Polish version, which was used in this study, consists of 50 items (10 for each personality dimension) translated and adapted by Pąchalska (2005). Third-person forms are available, enabling peer observations. The questionnaire is used in clinical contexts as a peer rating technique to examine personality changes in patients.⁴

Sample items of the five scales (two per each) are as follows:

Extraversion: S/he is the life of the party; __ doesn’t talk a lot (r).

Agreeableness (A): __ feels little concern for others (r); __ has a soft heart.

Conscientiousness (C): __ gets chores done right away; __ is always prepared.

Openness (O): __ has a rich vocabulary; __ has a vivid imagination.

Stability (S) (Neuroticism [N]): __ gets stressed out easily; __ worries about things.

Social interaction questionnaire

For the purpose of testing Hypothesis 3, participants provided information regarding their relationship with target persons. Social contacts were measured by five dichotomous items on the whereabouts of outside work interactions (at the actor’s, observer’s, and others’ homes, at pubs/restaurants, in the open air). Social support was checked by another set of five dichotomous items on types of help obtained from the partner (financial/material, emotional/personal, informative support). Psychological closeness was established by two 5-point items: “How much do you like that person?” and “How similar are you one to the other?”

All participants filled out the questionnaires in their respective mother tongues. Research sessions were conducted at the workplace, during breaks, or after work hours.

Results

IPIP measures

Cronbach reliabilities for all five scales are more than satisfactory; respective coefficients are as follows: for Agreeableness, α = .89 (.90_PL / .83_Ir); for Conscientiousness, α = .87 (.87_Pl / .84_Ir); for Extraversion, α = .83 (.83_Pl / .79_Ir); for Openness, α = .80 (.83_PL /.72_Ir); and Emotional Stability, α =.79 (.76_PL /.84_Ir). Structural equivalence was measured in two ways. When target rotation (to Polish solution) was performed separately on each of five dimensions (for each of the 10-item personality scales), the Tucker Φ_s were very high: A = .99; C = .96; E = .98; ~N = .97; and O = .91. However, when Polish and Irish five-factorial solutions were compared, structural equivalence for the whole IPIP instrument was low: A = .77; C = .71; E = .76; N = .70; and O = .56. Since our research goal was not to test the replicability of personality structure in Polish and Irish cultures (languages) but to compare individuals on two of the five theoretically well-established traits, acceptance of the former criterion of equivalence is justified.

Personality dimensions of the three target categories were compared. Results are demonstrated in Figure 1.⁵

Figure 1.

Personality Big Five Scores of Poles and Irish in Their Homelands and Polish Immigrants to Ireland.

MANOVA performed on five IPIP dimensions in three groups of participants rendered a significant Wilks λ = .66, F(10, 540) = 12.35, p < .001, η² = .19. Out of the five personality dimensions, differences in conscientiousness were the largest, F(2, 274) = 29.79, p < .001, η² = .18. Planned contrast to test Hypothesis 1 was performed, comparing the difference in conscientiousness between Polish immigrants and the two sedentary categories; it rendered a highly significant t(274) = 7.72, p < .001. Respective effect sizes were very high: For Polish immigrants and Irish nationals, d = 1.03; for Polish immigrants and conationals, d = 1.00.

A similar, though weaker, pattern of results was found with agreeableness, F(2, 274) = 4.44, p < .05, η² = .03. In line with Hypothesis 2, Polish migrants scored higher than both sedentary groups combined, t(274) = 2.91, p < .01 Respective effect sizes were moderate: For migrants and Irish nationals, d = .34; and for Polish conationals, d = .42.

In addition, Irish participants score higher than Poles (both immigrants and residents of Poland) on Extraversion, F(2, 274) = 5.94, p < .01, η² = .04, which is in line with results linking this dimension with individualism (Hofstede & McCrae, 2004). There was no difference between the groups on Emotional stability (F < 1). Finally, irrespective of their actual residence, Poles score higher than Irish on Openness to Experience, F(2, 274) = 8.36, p < .001, η² = .06.

Personality peer ratings and actor-observer relations

Scales of Social Contacts and Social Support were created by counting their partial indices (five occurrences in each). With control for duration of the relationship, Social Contacts differed between the three groups, F(2, 269) = 13.88, p < .001, η² = .09, and so did Social Support, F(2, 269) = 14.35, p < .001, η² = .10. In both cases, endogenous dyads in Poland (PaPo) formed the strongest bonds, while Polish immigrants seen from the perspective of Irish colleagues (PaIo) kept them lowest; for social contacts: PaPo(X– =1.52a)> IaPo(X– =1.03b)> PaIo(X– =.44c); for social support: PaPo(X– =1.92a)> IaPo(X– =1.53b)> PaIo(X– =.98c)6. Dyads perceived from the immigrant perspective looked more lively than from the Irish perspective. Interpersonal liking and similarity measures rendered insignificant or marginally significant results, respectively (with Irish actors obtaining the lowest scores).

Social Contacts and Social Support scales were next regressed on actor-attributed personality dimensions. Also, a composite variable, interpersonal closeness, comprising all its components (with an α = .82), was added. Table 3 presents the results of these analyses.

Table 3.

Regression Analyses of Actor-Observer Social Contacts and Interpersonal Closeness on Five Personality Dimensions.

Big Five Predictors	Social Contacts (β)	Social Support (β)	Interpersonal Closeness^a (β)
Openness	.36***	.23***	.31****
Extraversion		.20***	.17**
Agreeableness		.20**	.19**
Emotional Stability			.18**
Conscientiousness	−.24***	−.14*	−.15*
R ² _adj.	.09	.17	.30
F	25.61****	14.97****	24.33***

Interpersonal closeness is a composite variable, mean of social contacts, social support, similarity, and liking.

p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. ****p < .0001.

The three outcome variables were predicted with varying degrees of accuracy, which was the highest for the composite measure of interpersonal closeness. In all three cases, four or less personality traits entered as positive predictors, while conscientiousness always appeared negative, being a hindrance for all aspects of interaction with a colleague at work. Since immigrants scored highest on levels of conscientiousness and lowest on interpersonal relations, these results thoroughly confirm Hypothesis 3 on immigrants’ hard work blocking social contacts with majority members (i.e., forestalling their acculturation).

Discussion

All three hypotheses were confirmed. First, when compared to sedentary life conditions, conscientiousness rose with immigration. Hard work should not be regarded as a stable trait but as a potential that can be activated when adaptive.

Our pattern of results obtained for conscientiousness and, to a lesser degree, for agreeableness (Hypothesis 2) replicated what Ward et al. (2004) reported on Australian expatriates in Singapore. Findings from both studies suggest interpretation in terms of mechanisms adaptive for immigration, and not for culture fit hypothesis, as Ward et al. initially theorized. Indicative of hard work, conscientiousness is not, in other words, a consequence of values or practices differentiating between Polish and Irish cultures, which immigrants would strive to maintain or to acquire. Rather, it is a consequence of goal-directed strategies, typical of economic migration. These strategies entail also costs, by reducing the breadth and depth of interpersonal relations. Furthermore, conscientiousness negatively predicted social contacts and psychological closeness with local co-workers. Since social contacts with the local majority are important indicators of integration into the new society, hard work/conscientiousness inhibits such integration. Meeting conditions for migrants’ individual economic goals may be in conflict with integration, understood as a desirable product of the acculturation process in a broader perspective.

Forestalling contacts with locals and impeding acculturation, conscientious hard work is convergent with “separation attitudes” in the dominant acculturation research. Yet immigrants do not choose separation as a dislike for local culture. They prioritize economic goals, and separation appears as a side effect of this strategy.

This study has limitations. First is the low level of IPIP structural equivalence. This problem is partly overshadowed by high internal consistencies of each scale and also by the fact that only two of them are important for hypothesis testing. Second, it may well be that immigrants formed a self-selected group, which was higher on conscientiousness before leaving Poland. Study 2 will address this limitation by applying a different research design.

Self-Reported Personality Changes and Lifestyles (Study 2)

Research problems in Study 2 were operationalized in terms of immigrants’ self-reported personality changes and their relations with respect to lifestyles.

Self-Reported Personality Change

Personality change was taken into account by asking participants about their self-perceived transformation between the present time in Ireland and predeparture life in Poland. Like any type of comparative research, this study required fixing a point of reference for reporting change. When comparisons are made along the time axis, this can be done in two ways: by fixing the point of reference either in past or in the present time. Prospective direction of change is framed by asking the following: “How different am I now, compared to who I was then?” Retrospective perspective is captured by another question: “How different was I then, compared to who am I now?”

Studies on similarity judgments tell us that such shifting points of comparison often result in asymmetries (see Markus & Kitayama, 1991, for similarity judgments in cross-cultural research). Also, an optimistic inclination (bias) has been suggested regarding appraisal of life events (Peeters & Czapiński, 1990): Today is better than the past, and tomorrow will still be better. For immigrants, the idea of forward improvement is particularly important, serving as self-justification for their past decisions. Since all five personality dimensions regulate positive emotions (Yik, Russell, Ahn, Fernandez-Dolls, & Suzuki, 2002), their incremental, prospective changes should be expected.

Two hypotheses were derived from this reasoning:

Hypothesis 4: An optimistic inclination will be reflected in overall self-reported personality changes, particularly in conscientiousness and agreeableness, which are functional in immigrant life and more malleable to change.

Hypothesis 4.1: These progressive personality changes in conscientiousness and agreeableness will be more pronounced in prospective than in retrospective temporal frames.

Lifestyles

Four lifestyles, discussed in the theoretical section, were introduced in Study 2; they addressed two research problems. The first, was formulated as a hypothesis:

Hypothesis 5: Self-sacrifice is the dominant lifestyle among economic immigrants, and especially with those who perform low-skill jobs.

The second problem refers to a possible relationship between conscientiousness and lifestyles. Assuming progressive changes in conscientiousness, we are asking two questions:

Question 1: Is the resultant, incremental tendency toward hard work more related to self-sacrifice or to eudaimonia?

Question 2: Is the relationship between hard work and the two lifestyles moderated by prospective versus retrospective time frames?

Method

Participants

Another group of 118 Polish immigrants to Ireland served as participants in Study 2; 68 were women. The mean age was 30.00 years (SD = 6.2). The mean length of stay was 38.3 months (SD = 17.77). Compared to Study 1, participants had earned considerably high levels of education in Poland: 52% held an MA degree or above, and 11% had BA degrees; only 7% had a level of education that was below high school. Also, their current jobs in Ireland were of relatively high status: 34% declared being “specialists” or managers, 19% held clerical office or technical positions, 22% worked in services, 20% were skilled workers, and only 5% declared themselves as performing simple jobs.

Measures

IPIP: Prospective and retrospective self-reports

As in Study 1, the IPIP inventory was used, adapted for self-reports. Half of participants were ascribed to prospective and the other half to retrospective measurement conditions. Sample items for these conditions and scoring formulae for resultant measures are shown in Figures 2 and 3.⁷

Figure 2.

Prospective Frame.

Figure 3.

Retrospective Frame.

Lifestyles

A lifestyles questionnaire was constructed along the theoretical assumptions outlined earlier (see Table 2). Forty-eight items were used, 12 per each of the four scales. Sample items of these scales follow:

Eudaimonia: My work is my passion; I believe my work serves my development.

Self-sacrifice: It is not important what kind of job you perform, it is important how much you are paid for it; every day there are more Euros on my account, which gets me closer to reaching my desired goals.

Hedonism: Good life for me is a life of pleasures; pleasures give me a sense of happiness.

Alienation: I think my career leads to nowhere; I can’t see any deeper sense in the job I perform.

Results

IPIP personality measures

Four types of IPIP measures were used in the analyses for each of the five personality dimensions. The first two were direct self-reports referring either to the past life in Poland or to the present time in Ireland. The other two measures consisted of composite scores: (a) prospective, which were sums of past self-reports and perceived changes till the present time in Ireland, and (b) retrospective, which were sums of the current self-reports and perceived changes referring to the past life back in Poland. Internal reliabilities for the five personality dimensions, absolute and resultant (in parenthesis), were as follows: Extraversion, α = .78 (.69); Agreeableness, α = .82 (.78); Conscientiousness, α = .83 (.81); Emotional Stability, α = .83 (.69); and Openness, α = .69 (.62). Scale scores at reference points were psychometrically sound; corresponding to them, reliabilities of resultant scales were consistently lower, as should be expected with measures consisting of two components. Still, they were good for conscientiousness and agreeableness and acceptable for the remaining three. Correlations between absolute and resultant scores were very high: r _E = .83; r _A = .89; r _C = .81; r _S = .71; and r _O =.87.

A mixed design analysis of variance was run to test stability versus change on five personality dimensions. The type of time frame (prospective versus retrospective) was a between-subjects factor, while past versus present scores on five dimensions formed a repeated measures factor.

We first considered a global personality change, on five dimensions altogether. An effect of time was found, such that the present scores were higher than the past measures, F(1, 116) = 32.09, p < .001, η² = .22. This, however, was qualified by interaction with the time frame, F(1, 116) = 17.76, p < .001, η² = .13. A highly significant global index of change was obtained, but for prospective orientation only, F(1, 116) = 44.98, p < .001, η² = .28; the simple effect for retrospective orientation remained insignificant (F = 1.15).

A similar pattern of results was repeated for all five dimensions separately, but again as in Study 1, it was the strongest for conscientiousness. Its current measures were considerably higher than back in the time in Poland, F(1, 116) = 34.43, p < .001, η² = .23, but this incremental progress was highly significant only with prospective type of change, F(1, 116) = 44.32,p < .001, η² = .28, while the simple effect for retrospective change was not significant (F = 2.04, p = .16).⁸ These results are presented in Figure 4.

Figure 4.

Conscientiousness, in Pro- and Retrospective Time Frames.

Thus, Hypothesis 4, and its more specific version, Hypothesis 4.1, was confirmed. Polish immigrants in Ireland reported consistently progressive changes about themselves but only when in a prospective frame of mind. They had become more conscientious, agreeable, emotionally stable, cognitively open, and extraverted. Any systematic changes escaped their self-attention when temporal orientation was shifted retrospectively.

Lifestyles

All four lifestyle scales had very high internal reliabilities: eudaimonia, α_Eud.= .95; alienation, α_Alien.=.92; self-sacrifice, α_Sacr.=.87; and hedonism, α_Hed.=.79. However, the four scales were far from being unrelated. The strongest correlation was between eudaimonia and alienation, r(118) = −.78, p < .001, showing that one of them is largely a reversal of the other. Eudaimonia was also negatively correlated with self-sacrifice (r = −.43, p < .001) and the latter positively with alienation (r = .56, p < .001). Finally, hedonism (which is not work-related) was zero level correlated with all three remaining scales.

Differences between mean scores for the four lifestyles, though highly significant, F(3, 351) = 51.30, p < .001, η² = .305, did not conform with Hypothesis 5: ( ${\bar{X}}_{Eud}$ = 3.32^a) ≥ ( ${\bar{X}}_{Hed .}$ = 3.28^a) > ( ${\bar{X}}_{Scar}$ = 2.89^b) > ( ${\bar{X}}_{Alien .}$ = 2.13^c).⁹ Eudaimonia and hedonism largely overshadowed self-sacrifice.

Eudaimonia was positively correlated with the length of immigrant sojourn (r = .23, p < .05), with education earned (r = .36, p < .001), and with current job prestige (r = .48, p < .001). These correlations were reversed for alienation and self-sacrifice (length of stay, r _Alien. −.12, r _Sacr. = −.23, p < .05; education, r _Alien. −.42, p < .001, r _Sacr. = −.40, p < .001; current job status, r _Alien. = −.43, p < .001, r _Sacr. = −.40, p < .001). Thus, eudaimonia appears a lifestyle characterizing individuals with advanced education and job requirements. Our sample was biased in this direction, with over 50% of participants holding university degrees and qualified jobs.

Moderation effects of Cs time frames on lifestyle

Research Question 1 asked whether work effort, as indicated by resultant conscientiousness, would correlate with self-sacrifice or with eudaimonia. Another question, Question 2, inquired whether these relationships depended on time frame. Results are reported in Table 4.

Table 4.

Prospective vs. Retrospective Time Frames, Conscientiousness [Cs], and Lifestyles.

	Lifestyles
Correlations	Eudaimonia	Self-Sacrifice	Alienation
Csprosp. (n=54)
Csprosp. (n=54)	.48***	.01	−.26*
Csretrosp. (n=64)
Csretrosp. (n=64)	−.13	.48***	.25*
Hierarchical regression
Step 1
Cs	—	.33***	—
Step 2 (interaction)
Cs × Time Frame	−.32***	.33***	.25**
R ₍₁₁₅₎²	.10	.15	.06

Note: Moderation effects of temporal frames on Cs correlations/regression with Eudaimonia, Self-Sacrifice, and Alienation. Conscientiousness (Cs) under two temporal frames refers to composite scores:

(a) Cs_prosp. = Cs_PL + Δ_prosp.; (past level in Poland + prospective change)

(b) Cs_retrosp. = Cs_Ir + Δ_retrosp; (current level in Ireland + retrospective change).

— = predictor does not enter equation in Step 1.

p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

When the time frame was set for prospective change, it led to high positive correlation between resultant conscientiousness and eudaimonia, and its correlation was negative with alienation. When the retrospective temporal frame was installed, conscientiousness revealed a high positive correlation with self-sacrifice and also with alienation. Thus, with the frame switch, eudaimonia and self-sacrifice counterbalanced each other, and alienation changed its direction in correlation with conscientiousness.

Next, a series of hierarchical regression analyses were run on resultant conscientiousness scores and their interaction terms with time frames as lifestyles predictors. Interaction terms were products of centered Cs scores and time frames (prospective = −1, retrospective = 1). The results of these analyses are indicated in the lower part of Table 4. They reveal the moderating effects of temporal frames in conscientiousness dynamics on three lifestyles. These moderation effects appear as significant interactions terms in regression analyses for each of the three lifestyles, except hedonism. Significance of these interaction terms remains virtually intact when direct scores of conscientiousness (i.e., Cs in the past and Cs as now) substitute for its resultant measures (with added Δ-components of prospective or retrospective change, respectively).

The results of this study confirm our findings from Study 1 on the essential role of work-related conscientiousness as a measure of immigrant adaptation. Depending on a subtle switch between prospective versus retrospective framing, changes in this trait may be reflected either in a healthy lifestyle of eudaimonia or in a miserable self-sacrifice and alienation.

Study 3: Eastern Slav and Vietnamese Immigrants in Poland

The last study compares immigrant work involvement, lifestyles, thrift-spending tendencies, and subjective well-being, among Eastern Slavonic and Vietnamese in Poland. This way it meets postulates (4) and (5) on cultural factors in economic immigration, highlighted in the introductory section.

Cultural Contexts of the Study

In limited proportions, Poland is a receiving country for migrants from specific ethnocultural groups. The most numerous among them are Eastern Slavs: foremost Ukrainians but also Belarus, ethnic Russians, and citizens of Russia from Caucasian Republics. Another sizeable and distinctive group is the Vietnamese.

Eastern Slavs¹⁰

The phenomenon of Eastern Slavonic immigration dates back to the collapse of the USSR. It is largely a cross-border process, mostly from territories that belonged to Poland before World War II. The size of the Ukrainian immigrant community in Poland is estimated around 700,000, the largest in the country (of 38.5 million population).

Female immigrants offer home services (home management, children care; while men work in the construction industry), yet increasingly larger numbers of educated Ukrainians work in the field of medicine and in other professions.

The postcommunist region of predominantly the Slav countries is characterized by low social discipline: measured by Russia’s low scores on future orientation and uncertainty avoidance practices in Culture, leadership, and organizations. The GLOBE study of 62 nations (Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004) and by Ukraine’s low scores on the looseness-tightness dimension (Gelfand et al., 2011). This region is also extremely low on subjective well-being (Inglehart & Oyserman, 2004; Veenhoven, 2008).

Poland and Russia are remarkably close compared to other European nations on a number of pancultural dimensions (Boski, 2009, 2012). Close cultural and linguistic distance should be a facilitating factor for across-the-border Slav immigrant adaptation. Yet frequent periods of common historical fate have mixed consequences: not only shared experience but also memory of still-unhealed animosities.

Vietnamese

The history of Vietnamese settlement in Poland started in the 1960s, with an international student program between the then-communist countries. The second wave of immigrants arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Block and at the time of market-oriented reforms in still officially communist Vietnam. Those transformation-era immigrants were coming to Poland mainly as traders; with time, some have converted into established business-persons. Today, the Vietnamese population in Warsaw is estimated at around 30,000. They are more concentrated than the Slav people in terms of residential zones, location of jobs (formerly the Bazaar Europe, currently warehouses at fringes of the city), and sectors of employment (trading, commercial business, and food service/restaurants).¹¹

Culturally, Vietnam is very different from Poland and from its Slav neighbors. The country belongs to the region of post-Confucian culture. Though Vietnam has rarely been included in large cross-cultural projects, we have data from Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences on Long-Term Orientation (LTO), based on Bond’s Confucian work dynamism (Chinese Cultural Connection, 1987). East Asian countries occupy the six top positions on the LTO dimension, and Vietnam is among them, ranked fourth together with Japan. Two of the items loading on the LTO scale converge with our model of economic migrant condition: persistence (perseverance) and thrift. The first of them has affinity to hard work (conscientiousness), while the other expresses a tendency to control expenses and augment savings. Hofstede demonstrated that LTO correlates positively with an economic index of Marginal Propensity to Save, and with attitudinal questions concerning thrift, while negatively with leisure (Hofstede, 2001, pp. 357-358). Based on these results, the author concludes that “long term orientation stands for the fostering of virtues oriented towards future rewards, in particular, perseverance and thrift” (Hofstede, 2001, p. 359).

We expected Vietnamese and Slav immigrants to differ on several aspects of work-related behaviors, lifestyles, and thrift–extravagance.

Hypothesis 6: Compared to their Slav counterparts, Vietnamese immigrants will (a) exercise more work effort and dedication, (b) demonstrate more thrift in controlling expenses in order to increase savings, and (c) hold their subjective well-being more dependent on work-related lifestyles and on thrift, while less dependent on hedonism.

Method

Participants

Research samples consisted of 100 participants in each ethno-linguistic group. Among 100 Slav immigrants, there were 50 Ukrainians, 25 Belarus, and 25 Russians. There were no ethnic subcategories among 100 Vietnamese participants, most of whom were coming from the northern part of the country. Gender categories (102 women and 98 men) were spread equally in the Slav and Vietnamese groups. Vietnamese were 4.8 years older than Slav immigrants: ${\bar{X}}_{V}$ = 35.3 > ${\bar{X}}_{S}$ = 30.8 (p < .001). Vietnamese immigrants (58%) were more often married than Slav (34%) and more of them reported having children (49% vs. 20%). Vietnamese families were predominantly endogamic (90%), while this index was lower among Slavs (64%). One third of those married with children (of either group) had their spouses and offspring living in the country of origin. The mean length of stay in Poland measured in months was longer for Slav immigrants than for Vietnamese by about a year: ${\bar{X}}_{S}$ = 61.9 > ${\bar{X}}_{V}$ = 49.8 months. Also, all immigrants from the three neighboring countries had their status legalized (i.e., permanent or temporary cards of residence), while 12% of Vietnamese declared their sojourn illegal and another 9% were “tolerated” (i.e., in the process toward legalization).

In all, the Vietnamese sample is a step older and socially more stable. The Slavonic sample enjoys a legally more secure position in Poland and is more mixed by marital bonds with the host majority.

Measures

Assessment of work effort

Participants were asked to assess the number of hours they worked in a week preceding the interview and to estimate how representative that week has been for their current life. Next, they were evaluating the amount of physical cost of their workload, from “my work load is light” to “after a day of work, I hardly stand on my feet,” on a 5-point scale. They also compared their effort expenditure with (a) the amount of work they carried in their country of origin, (b) majority of Poles around them, and (c) their compatriots in Poland.

Lifestyles and life satisfaction

The same four scales measuring lifestyles as in Study 2—eudaimonia, self-sacrifice, hedonism, and alienation—were used in this investigation. Each scale was 12 items long. Next, the well known 5-item Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) scale (Diener, Emmons, Larson, & Griffin, 1985) was also employed, the range of responding covered a 7-point continuum (from 1 = totally disagree to 7 = totally agree).

Thrift- extravagance

A 12-item scale of behavioral readiness for thrift-extravagance in spending was constructed for the purpose of this study. Its items consisted of household monthly expenses in 12 domains (apartment rent, alimentation, telephone/Internet, hygiene/cosmetics, transportation/car maintenance, clothing, health, culture, education, holidays/vacations, and visiting own country). Respondents were asked to indicate on 5-point scales their appraisal of spending an extra 100 PLN (24 Euro) monthly, in each of the 12 domains, on top of the current expenses. The answers were ranging from −2 = a waste of money, that I would never allow myself (thrift) to 2 = nothing of a problem, I work in order to live comfortably (extravagant spending).

Procedure

Research materials were translated from Polish into three languages in which the interviews were conducted: Russian (R), Ukrainian (U), and Vietnamese (V). The authors of the Slav translations were bilingual immigrants who had completed their earlier education in their countries of birth before moving to Poland as graduate students. They switched between R and U for the purpose of back-translations.

V translation was carried out by a Vietnamese-Pole, residing in Poland for over 20 years, who had been a certified translator from Vietnamese into Polish. Linguistic reversal from Vietnamese into Polish was completed during the piloting practice stage, when members of the research crew of four were practicing the roles of interviewers and respondents, with two linguistic versions of the questionnaire in front of them. Inconsistencies were resolved when noticed.

Interviewers were members of their respective immigrant communities who drew convenience samples from these environments. Also, Vietnamese associations in Warsaw were involved in the process. All interviews were conducted in immigrants’ mother tongues. The process of data collection took 3 months, from February to April 2010. Monetary incentives were used to assure collaboration. Interviewers and respondents were each receiving an equivalent of 25 Euro per session, equal to an average day salary in Poland. Interviews were conducted at the respondents’ homes or at their place of work. Sessions lasted from 90 to 120 minutes.¹²

Results

Work hours and work load

Work effort in this study was measured directly, rather than inferred from conscientiousness scores as in Studies 1 and 2. All immigrants have reported working long hours, much exceeding the legal regulations in Poland set at 40 hours/week. Even so, the Vietnamese declared working 10 hours more than the combined Slav groups¹³ ( ${\bar{X}}_{V}$ = 63.09 > ${\bar{X}}_{S}$ = 53.78), F(1, 190) = 15.46, p < .001, η² = .075. Vietnamese found the work load much less tiresome than the Slav group did, F(1, 197) = 13.31, p < .001, η² = .063. Both immigrant groups considered themselves to be more hardworking than host Poles, t(97) = 4.51, p < .001 for Slav, and t(99) = 5.59, p < .001 for the Vietnamese. To complete the picture, immigrants from both groups considered (a) their amount of work back in the homeland and now in Poland to be even and (b) their individual amount of work being no different from that of other immigrant compatriots. All these findings corroborate Hypothesis 6a. Immigrants work more than the locals, and Vietnamese are more work-oriented than Slav immigrants.

Life styles, satisfaction, and thrift

Structural equivalence of the Lifestyles Questionnaire, used in Study 2, was tested first. We performed the analysis on combined samples of Study 2 (Polish) and Study 3 (Russian/Ukrainian and Vietnamese). First, a pancultural exploratory factor analysis with Promax rotation revealed a three-factorial structure, such that items measuring eudaimonia and alienation (reversed) loaded on a bipolar factor I; this factor, E/A, explained 30.9% of variance. All items covering self-sacrifice were grouped in the second S_S factor (9.45% variance), while hedonism emerged as the third H factor (8.59% variance). This was followed by similar factor analyses for each of the three ethnolinguistic samples (each with the size of about 100 participants). Finally, target rotations to the pancultural solution were performed on each of these three solutions. Tucker Φ coefficients were generally very high (with six cases of nine exceeding the recommended criterion of .90). For the Vietnamese sample, E/A = .98, S_S = .96, and H = .95; for the Eastern Slav sample, E/A = .97, S_S = .85, and H = .96; and for Poles in Ireland, E/A = .97, S_S = .89, and H = .91.

Sound psychometric qualities found in Study 2 were replicated. The Cronbach α reliabilities, general and at the group level, were as follows: eudaimonia = .96 (E_S = .95, E_V = .96); hedonism = .85 (H_S = .87, H_V = .86); self-sacrifice = .86 (S_S = .83, S_V = .88); and alienation = .93 (A_S = .97, A_V = .91). SWLS had an α of .86 (SWLS_S = .88, SWLS_V = .85).

Structural equivalence of the Thrift-Extravagance scale for Slav and Vietnamese samples was also high (Tucker Φ = .99). The scale reached a Cronbach_α of .93 (T_S = .93, T_V = .94).

Four lifestyle scales were subjected to a MANOVA for the three combined groups from Studies 2 and 3. The within-effects for lifestyles were highly significant, F(3, 939) = 162.63, p < .001, η² = .34. The interaction effect with groups also reached a significant level, F(6, 939) = 2.72, p < .05, η² = 014. Significant intergroup differences occurred for self-sacrifice, F(2, 313) = 11.57, p < .001, η² = .07, and for eudaimonia, F(2, 313) = 3.38, p < .05, η² = .02, where Vietnamese scored above Eastern Slav immigrants in Poland and Polish immigrants in Ireland. Slav participants scored identically with Polish immigrants in Ireland on all four scales (these differences were not qualified by participants’ age or by gender). Altogether, self-sacrifice reveals the largest cross-cultural differences among immigrant lifestyles in the two studies, while eudaimonia is the most elevated, and alienation is the lowest and undifferentiated. Figure 5 illustrates these comparisons.

Figure 5.

Four Lifestyles Among Slavonic and Vietnamese Immigrants in Poland and Poles in Ireland

In Study 3, Diener’s SWLS score and Thrift-Extravagance scale scores did not differentiate between Vietnamese and Slav immigrants. Correlations between six variables are reported in Table 5 separately for Slav and for Vietnamese immigrants.

Table 5.

Correlations Between Four Lifestyles, Subjective Well-Being, and Thrift-Overspending.

	Slav Sample (n = 100)
	Eudaimonia	Hedonism	Self-Sacrifice	Alienation	SWLS	Thrift-Extravagance
Vietnamese sample (n = 98)
Eudaimonia	—	−.04	−.42***	−.78***	.20* ₍₁₎	.26*
Hedonism	−.11	—	.04	.08	.27** ₍₂₎	.33**
Self-sacrifice	−.03	.01	—	.44***	−.30** ₍₃₎	−.22*
Alienation	−.76***	.30**	.32***	—	−.10₍₄₎	−.23
SWLS	.59*** ₍₁₎	−.23* ₍₂₎	−.02₍₃₎	−.53*** ₍₄₎	—	.41*** ₍₅₎
Thrift-extravagance	−.16	.49***	.01	.24*	−.26** ₍₅₎	—

Note: Correlations for Slavs above the diagonal; correlations for Vietnamese below the diagonal.

p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

These results show a reverse pattern of correlations between SWLS and the lifestyles in the Slav and Vietnamese groups. For eudaimonia, the range is from low positive for Slavs to high positive for Vietnamese migrants. An opposite order appears for alienation, where low negative correlation among Slavs corresponds with high negative among Vietnamese. Self-sacrifice is negatively correlated with SWLS among Slavs and at a zero level among Vietnamese. For Hedonism, a positive correlation among Slavs is mirrored by a negative correlation among Vietnamese. Finally, correlations between SWLS and Thrift-Extravagance are also contrasted from positive among Slavs to negative among Vietnamese. Thus, culture acts as a moderator of relations between lifestyles and subjective well-being.

This moderation is further documented in hierarchical multiple regression analysis, where SWLS was first regressed on eudaimonia, self-sacrifice, hedonism, and thrift-extravagance and on their interaction terms with ethnicity on the second step (R² _adj. = .274). Three predictors emerged: eudaimonia (β = .342, p < .001) in the first step and two interaction terms, Thrift-Extravagance × Ethnicity (β = −.279, p < .001) and Eudaimonia × Ethnicity (β = .231, p < .001). More extravagance among Slavs and more thrift among Vietnamese effectively predicted subjective well-being; also, higher eudaimonia among Vietnamese added a significant increment in SWLS.

It was further assumed that the three lifestyles should impact on life satisfaction indirectly through thrift-extravagance. Extravagance should serve hedonist goals and contribute this way to subjective well-being. Thrift, on the other hand, is hypothesized to reduce expenses and be instrumental to meeting self-sacrifice and/or eudaimonic goals. To test this idea, a path model with thrift-extravagance as mediator was analyzed. The empirical model is presented in Figure 6.

Figure 6.

From Lifestyles and Thrift-Extravagance to Subjective Well-Being (Slavonic and Vietnamese Models).

The model has good fit, X²(2) = 2.21, p = .33; CMIN/DF = 1.10, NFI = .985, CFI = .998, RMSEA = .023. It explained 22% of the variance for the Slav and 39% of the variance for the Vietnamese sample.

Attention should be drawn to two variables that demonstrate opposite effects among Vietnamese and Slav immigrants on the outcome variable (SWLS). First is eudaimonia, with its large impact on SWLS among Vietnamese, but an insignificant effect among Slav. Also, for the latter group, eudaimonia was negatively related to self-sacrifice and had a positive path to extravagance. This was not the case with the Vietnamese, where eudaimonia was closer to the thrift pole of the scale on spending. The bipolar dimension thrift-extravagance is the second crucial variable in the model. In both groups, it was related to hedonism. Whereas spending and hedonist pleasures promoted subjective well-being among Slav immigrants, they inhibited life satisfaction among the Vietnamese. The mediating role of thrift-extravagance in the model is, however, very modest (with indirect effects of .10 for hedonism and .08 for eudaimonia in the Slav sample and zero levels in the Vietnamese sample), compared to the role of culture as its moderator.

Discussion

The main purpose of Study 3 was to compare two culturally very different immigrant groups. Hypothesis 6 was confirmed in two ways.

First, as predicted from their cultural heritage based on Confucian work dynamics, the Vietnamese reported more work effort and less fatigue than Slavonic immigrants. Furthermore, they showed more eudaimonic dedication but also felt more sense of self-sacrifice. Eastern Slav immigrants in Poland did not differ in these lifestyles from Polish immigrants in Ireland. Thus, a substantial cultural difference in adaptation patterns to immigrant conditions of South-East Asians and Central-Eastern Europeans was found .

Second, Hypothesis 6c was also confirmed. Culture was clearly a moderator between immigrant lifestyles and their subjective well-being. For Vietnamese, their SWLS depended primarily on eudaimonia and thrift, much in line with Hofstede’s (2001) theorizing. Slav immigrants, on the other hand, built their life satisfaction on hedonism jointly with spending extravagance and on rejection of self-sacrifice. This aligns with their cultural background of low social discipline, historically called sarmatism (Boski, 2012).

General Discussion

This article has attempted to draw attention to the much-neglected and misrepresented psychology of immigrants. Neglected have been economic aspects of life characterizing millions of people who decided to change their country of residence to improve their standards of living. Misrepresented has been treating these problems as completely accountable by acculturation psychology.

To amend this situation, a new psychological model of economic immigration has been proposed, with hard work, effort, and savings orientation at its center stage. The model is too broad for being wholly tested in the three studies reported in this article. Still, empirical evidence is sufficient to enable its initial evaluation.

Work Effort as a Consequence of Economic Immigrant Condition

There is ample evidence from all three studies supporting the claim for work effort to be the central component of economic migrants’ life conditions. A rival hypothesis would argue that work effort should be a result of acculturation (i.e., acquiring a set of values and practices characteristic of the new culture, or maintaining the old one). Results obtained in Study 1 gave unequivocal support to the proposed model. Polish immigrants in Ireland were perceived as more conscientious than their peers in Poland and Irish nationals in Ireland. It was that specific situational context, and not the impact of either one the two cultures, which was responsible for these findings.

Another important result from Study 1 showed that hard-working immigrants spent less time and were more distant to their local peers. Thus, it is not necessary to postulate a “separation acculturative strategy” as the root cause for immigrants remaining isolated and failing integration with the majority culture. A simpler explanation is suggested: It consists of placing pay work and savings on top of life priorities, at the expense of maintaining interpersonal contacts with the local majority, for which there may be no time, energy, nor will to spend money.

Savings and Thrift

With their savings and transfers to families back home, immigrants substantially contribute to economies of their countries of origin. This objective evidence has been well documented earlier in this article (Poles, Vietnamese, and Mexicans) and seems to be universal.

There are sound arguments for thrift being a cultural virtue, especially valued among Vietnamese, even though there were no significant differences between Vietnamese and Slav immigrants on the Thrift-Extravagance scale in Study 3. In a follow-up of this study, Poles working with Vietnamese in Warsaw were approached, and very large differences were found between these two groups: Poles were on the spending side of the scale, while the Vietnamese exercised thrift (Górecka, 2012). Furthermore, consequences of thrift-extravagance are culturally moderated: Restraint in spending leads to more life satisfaction among Vietnamese, but a reverse tendency is observed among Eastern Slav immigrants.

Lifestyles and Life Satisfaction

The formulation of lifestyles has emerged from the literature on subjective well-being and positive psychology. The distinction between eudaimonic and hedonist concepts of a good life (Waterman, 1993) has been supported in our studies. The two lifestyles have contrasting implications among Vietnamese, to whom eudaimonia fosters subjective well-being, and among Eastern Slavs, for whom hedonism and spending predict good life. But it was hypothesized that self-sacrifice would reflect the essence of immigrant condition: work, which does not provide intrinsic motivation or satisfaction but is a source of income for delayed gratifications. This hypothesis was not confirmed. It was eudaimonia, and not self-sacrifice, that dominated as lifestyle among all three groups in Studies 2 and 3.¹⁴

That work becomes for immigrants an inherently rewarding and virtuous passion is not easy to explain. Polish media lament the slave-exploitation of Vietnamese immigrant workers in Warsaw, yet they seem not to feel this way. Supposedly, Confucian work ethics provides them with an upgrading justification of what they do. A possibility that this devotion to work is a consequence of their immigrant status (like among Poles in Ireland) rather than of Vietnamese heritage culture should also be entertained.¹⁵ In another follow-up study, Połońska (2012) found that the Vietnamese scored on eudaimonia even higher in the home land than did their compatriots in Warsaw; also, SWLS regression on eudaimonia was stronger in Hanoi than in Warsaw. All of it supports a cultural line of interpretation of Study 3 results, rather than the mechanics of immigrant condition alone.

Temporal Frame Switch in Self-Reports

The psychological portrait of economic migrants, which has emerged from our studies, is positive. Participants seem to enjoy their work and report personal changes in constructive and functional directions. Yet Study 2 showed how easy these results can be turned around by a minor framing procedure. The sense of personal progress is felt only when change becomes constructed within prospective temporal orientation. The effects of conscientiousness and its incremental change on elevating the current level of eudaimonia occurred only in this experimental condition. When self-reports were cast in retrospective time frame, the impact of conscientiousness and its changes on three lifestyles becomes opposite: by lowering eudaimonia, while raising self-sacrifice and alienation.

Typically, self-reports of research participants are obtained in the present time. But in acculturation/immigration studies, we have to do with processes that invariably entice temporal comparisons. The point of reference should not be left unchecked, because our results so much depend on whether it is set between now and then or between then and now. It looks as though a prospective frame generates a progressive/optimist type of reported change.

Conclusion

An economic psychology of immigration deserves its place in cross-cultural psychology. It starts with the mundane observation that millions of immigrants change their country of origin not for the purpose of acquiring new cultural programming but to improve their material life conditions. Also, psychological changes that appear during this process are not necessarily products of culture contact but consequences of a drastically different lifestyle: working hard and saving money in a new, volatile environment.

That acculturation is not the prime concern for new immigrants may appear as a bold statement after three decades of intensive research. Yet the goal of this article is not to deny the importance of acculturation but to trim its scope down from embracing all processes and changes occurring after a migratory move to those which are specific for culture contact and learning.

It is left to future studies to compare psychological adaptation due to acculturation and to economic migration. The best contrast would be to compare those people who left their country of origin to work for money with those who did it for learning purposes. Still, human reality is rarely defined in such dualistic, yes or no, ways. With most migrants, economic adaptation and culture contact/acquisition take place simultaneously or sequentially and with different dynamics. Quite possibly, socioeconomic adaptation prevails at the onset of migration, when acculturation is a by-product of everyday survival effort. Later, when life decisions for a permanent stay in the new country are taken and implemented, acculturation may become more central.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

Study #3 was supported by a research grant from the European Fund for Integration of Third Countries’ Citizens (14/4/2008/EFI).

Notes

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A Psychology of Economic Migration

Abstract

Keywords

Acculturation and Immigration: Culture Learning vs. Money Earning

Psychology of Immigration: Toward a Model of Psychological Disharmony

Priority goals in economic migrant condition

Psychological disharmony and economic migrant’s stress

Immigrant life styles

Coping fitness

Cultural factors

The present studies: An overview

Studies 1 and 2

Historical and Cultural Background

Peer-Rated Personality and Social Contacts (Study 1)

Method

Participants

Design

Actors–observers

Measures

Instrument: International Personality Item Pool (IPIP)

Social interaction questionnaire

Results

IPIP measures

Personality peer ratings and actor-observer relations

Discussion

Self-Reported Personality Changes and Lifestyles (Study 2)

Self-Reported Personality Change

Lifestyles

Method

Participants

Measures

IPIP: Prospective and retrospective self-reports

Lifestyles

Results

IPIP personality measures

Lifestyles

Moderation effects of Cs time frames on lifestyle

Study 3: Eastern Slav and Vietnamese Immigrants in Poland

Cultural Contexts of the Study

Eastern Slavs 10

Vietnamese

Method

Participants

Measures

Assessment of work effort

Lifestyles and life satisfaction

Thrift- extravagance

Procedure

Results

Work hours and work load

Life styles, satisfaction, and thrift

Discussion

General Discussion

Work Effort as a Consequence of Economic Immigrant Condition

Savings and Thrift

Lifestyles and Life Satisfaction

Temporal Frame Switch in Self-Reports

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Notes

References

Eastern Slavs¹⁰