Travels in hyper-diversity: Multiculturalism and the contextual assessment of acculturation

We argue that current acculturation research offers an incomplete picture of the psychological changes taking place in contemporary multicultural societies. Several characteristics of the Canadian multicultural context highlight the limitations in current acculturation research: namely, themes of hyper-diversity, hybridity, dimensionality and the importance of local context. Canada is a case in point, but these themes are generalizable to other contemporary multicultural contexts. To address the limitations of the traditional psychological acculturation paradigm, we propose an innovative research approach to study acculturation: the Cultural Day Reconstruction Method (C-DRM). We report on two studies that implemented this diary method, to demonstrate that this research tool (1) addresses theoretical critiques of current acculturation research and (2) captures some of the complexity of acculturation in contemporary multicultural contexts. The C-DRM was constructed in response to the local research environment but we hope it will become part of a new generation of tools for the contextual assessment of acculturation.