ARCHIVED – Recent Immigrants, Earlier Immigrants and the Canadian-Born: Association with Collective Identities

Tara Gilkinson and Geneviève Sauvé
Research and Evaluation
Citizenship and Immigration Canada
September 2010

Collective identities are statements about categorical membership, which can be understood to be, on the one hand, socially constructed, yet, on the other, real and meaningful. Levels of identification provide insight into feelings of belonging, perceptions of settlement, and overall life satisfaction and therefore can be used as an important indicator of social integration. High levels of identification have “widespread instrumental value in virtue of satisfying desire or needs to belong (or to identify with others, or be recognized by others) and thereby secure goods such as psychological security, self-esteem and feelings of being at home in the world” (Mason 2000, 54).

Acknowledgement: We wish to thank Martha Justus and Chona Iturralde from Citizenship and Immigration Canada for their support in this project. We would also like to thank Anne-Marie Robert and Jessie-Lynn MacDonald for their extensive comments and suggestions, and Dr. Neil Nevitte for making this paper possible. Finally, the authors would like to thank Wayne Chu (University of Toronto) for his contribution to this study, and are extremely grateful for his data analysis work and additional support for this project.

The views and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of Citizenship and Immigration Canada or the Government of Canada.

Recent Immigrants, Earlier Immigrants and the Canadian-Born: Association with Collective Identities (PDF, 632.76KB)


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