Minority Groups According to Acculturation Strategies

In this chapter, we test which acculturation strategies are prevalent in the media portrayal of Jews and Judaism in the West and of Muslims and Islam in the West. We conduct our statistical tests to assess the two dimensions of acculturation, that is maintenance of culture of origin and contact sought among groups, individually, before combining them to match the four acculturation strategies identified by Berry: multiculturalism, melting pot, segregation, and exclusion. Contrary to our hypotheses, we find maintenance significantly more frequently prevalent in articles on Muslims than on Jews. The intergroup difference was only marginally significant for contact. Combining the two dimensions, our results point to Muslims being significantly more frequently associated with segregation than Jews, while exclusion is significantly more frequently associated with Jews than with Muslims. We discuss our findings in the context of existing studies and conclude by linking our analysis to correlates of the most favorable acculturation strategy and intergroup identity as well as to the need for further research on intergroup relations between a dominant group and multiple non-dominant groups.