Acculturation as intergenerational trajectory and accountability concerns in immigrant youth discourse

The aim of this study is to explore the ways in which young ‘second generation’ immigrants from Albania in Greece account for their acculturation in semi-structured interviews and orient to different acculturation strategies. Interviews took place in Thessaloniki and 6 women and 13 men, aged between 21 and 30 years, participated. Analysis, which used the tools and concepts of discursive and rhetorical social psychology, indicated that participants’ accounts of acculturation involve multifaceted temporal, intergenerational and intergroup comparisons and juxtapositions which raise important dilemmas of accountability and involve interesting tensions and contradictions. Within these comparative accounts, participants are concurrently oriented to both construct themselves as active agents of a successful integration procedure, on one hand, and to show affinity to important ‘others’, on the other hand. Therefore, the prioritization of different acculturation strategies constitutes the by-product of managing ideological dilemmas in context.