Biculturalism, Subjective Socioeconomic Status, and Depressive Symptoms Among Chinese-Italian Youth: An Exploratory Study

The study investigated the relationship between Socioeconomic Status (SES), Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) and depressive symptoms among Chinese-Italian youth. Several statistical methods were applied to examine both independent and combined effects of BII and SES on depression measured by the CES-D scale. Overall, subjective SES of participants has proven to be a stronger predictor of depressive symptoms than BII integration, although the evidence is inconclusive and inconsistent. Given the non-parametric nature of the dataset, non-parametric tests were given the priority. Participants reporting lower SES exhibited significantly higher CES-D scores, BII in contrast showed only insignificant trend. Importantly, parametric tests showed that both trends were present but insignificant. Moreover, further tests suggested no mutual relationships, interaction or cooccurrence for any SES and BII groupings suggesting that both the factors shape mental health of considered populations independently. Given the nature of the evidence the results have to be interpreted cautiously, although pointing out an interesting trend relevant to BII research. The study highlights that prior BII research may not have sufficiently explored the topics of interactions between BII and SES in shaping the wellbeing of minority groups. Although seemingly mutually unrelated, SES seems to account more for CES-D score variability within the dataset than BII does. Given several limitations of the study further research in the area is necessary to ground better the nature of the interaction.