**4. Discussion**

In this chapter, we have tried to find out what the habits, traditions and novelties in the celebration of festivities are telling us about the acculturation orientations of the Russian immigrant youth in Finland. An understanding of how immigrants interpret their behaviour and attitudes is like a window looking upon both their social positioning and self-identification. The qualitative interviews conducted during the fieldwork allow us to have a bottom-up understanding of how Russian immigrant youth "take root" in the host country, how the new understandings gained in the interaction with another culture are accepted and what is the function of heritage culture in the acculturation process.

The study conducted among Russian youth in Finland provides proof that acculturation should be conceptually understood as a process; respectively, it is necessary to "shift from a focus on developmental end-states (like "integration" and "competence") towards a more process-oriented notion of acculturation that can account for situated, negotiated and often contested developmental trajectories [30]". Mutual adjustment of people coming from different cultural backgrounds is a complex and long process involving both cultural and psychological changes. Therefore, social psychology concepts can be helpful when studying acculturation.

The understanding of the dynamics of the acculturation process can be improved by the social representation theory [31–33]. It explains that an individual's behaviour and relationships with representatives of one or another culture are determined by social representations as collectively constructed systems of meanings. In other words, social representations are socially cognitive systems of values, ideas, beliefs and practices helping an individual in self-orientation as well as orientation in the world [34]. When interacting with a different culture, immigrants meet new social representations and formulate their attitude towards them. Moscovici has observed that, depending on the social setting, individuals may have a different and even absolutely opposite attitude towards one and the same thing or phenomenon. To denote that, Moscovici has introduced the term of *cognitive polyphasia* [35]. It helps us understand that, depending on specific cultural and social and political aspects, immigrants balance between assimilation, integration, separation and marginalisation. To classify immigrants according to their acculturation strategies would be an overly simplified approach; yet the data obtained within the framework of our research enable to conclude that Russian immigrant youth balance mainly between assimilation and integration.

Interaction with different cultures yields a variety of identity positions ([36] p. 148), and an individual must find a solution for such polyphony. This results in identity hybridity [37]. The findings among Russian youth in Finland coincide with the conclusions of the research conducted elsewhere. The studies of immigrant youth confirm that biculturalism is characteristic of the young generation of immigrants [38–40]. Researchers have developed theoretical proof that migrants may identify themselves with two cultures at a time [4, 41]. This study conducted among Russian youth in Finland provides an empirical proof that immigrants participate in two cultures: they accept the host culture without giving up the heritage culture. In the case of Russian youth in Finland, we can talk about conformity with Berry's bidimensional acculturation model [8], which is characteristic of the acculturation of individuals in an environment of two different cultural contacts, where the acculturation strategy is determined by the dynamic relationships between an individual's willingness to preserve the ethnic heritage culture and participation in a non-native culture. The existence of biculturalism in the Finnish immigrant environment is determined by the fact that the country is still on its way to a multicultural society where a tridimensional cultural model exists.

Acculturation strategies are unstable, and they are not mutually exclusive [42]. Moreover, the latest research suggests that new acculturation strategies are developing all the time. Under the impact of globalisation, multiple cultural affiliations are emerging [43, 44], as technological innovations provide opportunities of interacting with other cultures in an indirect or intermittent way, thereby resulting in a new acculturation strategy – remote acculturation [45–47]. In the case of Russian young people in Finland, we cannot talk of a remote acculturation orientation, because their interests do not reach beyond the Russian and Finnish cultures. This has been primarily determined by the language proficiency. Fieldwork observations suggest that the Russian young people have a considerably poorer English language proficiency than their Finnish peers, because they spend a lot of free time with

#### *Acculturation Orientations among Russian Youth in Finland DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110303*

Russian speaking peers and choose Russian language products on social networks, music platforms and media. Hence, the Americanisation characteristic of the Finnish youth culture [48] has not reached the Russian immigrant youth yet.

Host country society expects assimilation or at least integration of immigrants, while immigrants prefer integration [49, 50]. Moreover, the willingness of integration is higher with respect to the well-being indicators (life satisfaction, self-esteem and social adjustment) than with respect to culture [4]. This enables us to understand why the immigrants' orientation towards integration still does not yield the expected results. Those who are oriented towards integration find out that the values of the heritage culture and host country differ. In the case of festivities, the young Russian immigrants in Finland want to celebrate the festivities loudly, splendidly and pompously, and they are perplexed as to why the Finns do not have major celebrations even to mark Finland's National Independence Day on December 6. One culture singles out solidarity as a value, whereas the other praises individuality, which the leader of one group conceptualised using the term of "cultural code".

Interviews with the young Russians highlighted changes in acculturation orientations depending on the age group. Telling about their first experience of studies at a Finnish school, young people recall their willingness to be like the Finnish children, thus confirming their orientation towards assimilation. During the years of their adolescence, however, they felt as labelled "other" mainly because of their language proficiency, hence they changed their acculturation orientation. They started to stick deliberately to the heritage culture; respectively, their orientation changed from assimilation to integration. With regard to future research, this study conducted among the Russian youth in Finland suggests that it would be worthwhile to focus more actively on children acculturation problems, using the qualitative approach, which would enable a more in-depth understanding of the social challenges faced by children in the acculturation process. Developmental research shows that children see the importance of social categories (ethnicity, gender etc.) and tend to formulate their social identity [51, 52]. Acquiring a social identity is one of the components of children's development. Previous findings show that during early school-age children are exposed to interaction with various social identities and start understanding the relationships between them [53]. Through this experience, they acquire multiple social identities. When deciding, for example, who they want to be friends with, what music they want to listen to and what books they want to read, children start making choices between their heritage culture and the host culture. In order to discover the acculturation orientations of children, it is important to take an account of their experiences.
