Att hitta sig själv : om identitetsskapande hos ungdomar med utländsk bakgrund

Introduction:We have chosen to investigate how adolescents with a foreign background experience their identity building. As a theoretical frame of reference we have used the Theory of Symbolic Interactionism with George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman as inspiration. The main concept in this essay is identity with culture and ethnicity as close entrenched concepts.Purpose:The purpose of this study is to examine and to describe how adolescents with a foreign background relate to, and create their identities in different cultural contexts.Method:To investigate how adolescents describe their identities we have used half-structured interviews. We chose to do a half-structured life-world interview in the form of a themed interview guide. We have interviewed six informants with the age of 16 to 20 years old that are born in Sweden by parents with a foreign background. In the analysis, we themed the empirical data for factors linked to the sense of belonging.Result:The study shows that the informants develop their socio-cultural identity in relation to other people in their environment. For adolescents with a foreign background, the availability of bilingualism is an opportunity to communicate with people belonging to different cultural contexts. An important asset is being able to speak the mother tongue, it makes adolescents aware of belonging and they can identify with their parents' culture. The adolescents feel a dual cultural affiliation, as they neither feel at home in Sweden or in their parents' homeland. They also feel categorized as immigrants of the community much because of their appearance and their names. The adolescents show that they have developed a kind of hybrid identity, or a third identity, characterized by the feeling to be himself in all situations, but with the ability to switch between different cultures. It also suggests that young people are experiencing a clash of cultures that divide them, when loyalty to the family and the desire to fit into society collide.