Yen Le, L. Mickey Fenzel, Ph.D., Jill L. Snodgrass, Ph.D., Thanh V. Tran, Ph.D.
Acculturative Stress and Coping Processes among Middle-aged Vietnamese-born American Catholics: The Roles of Spirituality, Religiosity, and Resilience on Well-Being
Abstract:
This study employed a quantitative cross-sectional design to examine the relationship
of acculturative stress, spirituality, religiosity, and resilience on psychological
distress and life satisfaction for Vietnamese American immigrants. The ultimate goal
of this study is to develop a multidimensional coping framework, namely the Transactional
Model of Acculturative Stress and Coping Process, as a way of understanding and intervening
for clinicians to work with people going through midlife experiences and/or midlife
crises associated with the experience of being an immigrant. Participants in this
study were 413 middle-aged Vietnamese-born American Catholics. Results from the zero-order
correlation analyses indicated that depression and life satisfaction were significantly
related to spirituality, religiosity, resilience, and five personality traits; but
it did not correlate with acculturative stress. A series of hierarchical multiple
regressions examined the main effects and interaction effects of spirituality, religiosity,
and resilience when controlling for gender, religious status, language, years since
immigration, and five personality traits. Results demonstrated that no main effect
for acculturative stress and no significant interactive effects in predicting depression
and life satisfaction were found. Religious Involvement, Religious Crisis, and Resilience
in Midlife predicted significantly depression and life satisfaction over these other
variables (ΔR2 scores ranged from .01 to .04). These findings provided further support
for the hypotheses that religiosity and resilience are important resources for managing
psychological distress and enhancing life satisfaction for Vietnamese-born American
Catholic immigrants at midlife. Implications for counseling practice and future research
were discussed.
Keywords: Spirituality, religiosity, personality, stress, resilience, immigrant, midlife