The Organization of Ethnocultural Attachments Among Second-Generation Germans

Abstract

Recent research suggests that two ethnocultural “identities”—such as ethnic identity or national identity—can be compatible (positively correlated) or in conflict (negatively correlated) within and across immigrant-origin groups. In the present article, I advance a more cognitively oriented framework for using correlational patterns to map how immigrant-origin people organize their attachments to a variety of ethnocultural categories. In explaining the value of this framework, I embark on a multistage empirical illustration. First, I perform a correlational class analysis (CCA) using a sample of second-generation Germans and a vector of 14 identity-related indicators. Second, I use a series of linear regressions and a descriptive visualization to clarify the results of my CCA. Third, I estimate a multinominal logistic regression that demonstrates how social attributes—and specifically, religious affiliation—impose constraints on the latent schemes that immigrant-origin respondents gravitate towards to organize their ethnocultural attachments.