Acculturation and Educational Achievement in American Samoan Adolescents

Abstract

The relationship of educational achievement to overt (the directly observable) and covert (the psychological) measures of acculturation was explored for 190 high school seniors from American Samoa using canonical variate analysis. Three statistically significant and situationally interpretable relationships were found to exist between the overt and covert sets of variables, indicating that multiple acculturative approaches were operating simultaneously within Samoan adolescent culture. Educational achievement was found to be related mainly to the modern man approach to acculturation, the only approach to cross-validate. The study emphasized the probable multivariate nature of the acculturation process and the importance of verifying hypotheses through cross-validation.