Differences in Attitudes Towards Women Among Three Groups of Filipinos: Filipinos in the Philippines, Filipino American Immigrants, and U.S. Born Filipino Americans

This study examined the relationship between acculturation and attitudes towards women. The study focuses on 390 native Filipino, immigrant Filipino, and U.S. born Filipino American undergraduate students. Early research on acculturation has assumed that as people become acculturated to their host cultures, their own culture of origin weakens. Whether a group's cultural values and attitudes change may be tied to acculturation. For example, research has found that gender role expectations are associated with changes in core cultural values. Thus, this study utilizes the Attitudes Towards Women's scale to measure changes in cultural values. Changes in values due to acculturation may affect family dynamics, including family conflict, within this population. This study revealed that Filipinos do not follow the typical acculturation framework wherein the longer a group is in the host country the more acculturated they become. This study found that although native Filipinos did have the most conservative attitudes towards women, that immigrant Filipinos had the most egalitarian, even more so than U.S. born Filipino Americans who were expected to have the highest scores, because of their higher level of acculturation. The findings suggest that acculturation may not exhibit a clear linear progression as presented in past literature. (C) 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.