Exploring Chinese/Taiwanese immigrant women's cross-cultural experiences in the context of intercultural marriages.

摘要

This phenomenological study aimed to provide a gender- and particularly culture-sensitive perspective to understand the phenomenon of Chinese/Taiwanese immigrant women's cross-cultural experiences in the intersubjective context of their heterosexual Asian/White intercultural marriages. This study adopted Amedeo Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological psychological method to analyze data collected through audiotaped semistructured interviews with 6 recruited participants from the Greater Washington, DC, metropolitan area. The findings of this qualitative study helped fill a gap in the existing literature, particularly in the domain of quantitative research, as they specifically reflected Chinese/Taiwanese immigrant women's lived experiences in the cross-cultural context of their intercultural marriages. The participants were rendered an opportunity embedded in this study to meet with their lifeworld by virtue of the process of shifting from the prereflective presence to the reflective consciousness of their cross-cultural experiences in their intercultural marriages. The findings of this study were presented through a synthesized general structure derived from the most invariant key constituents across 6 accounts of descriptive protocols in narratives. Findings showed the psychological meanings ascribed to the unfolding of the participants' naive descriptions of their cross-cultural experiences as their lived experiences manifesting generally in their appreciation of a culturally enriched life, their consciousness of illuminating cultural differences in everyday life, their relationships with in-laws under sociocultural influences, and how they experienced their fluid, contextual selves through their emotional expressions and experiences modulated by the role of gender from within a relational frame of reference. As a result, the participants cultivated a heightened self-awareness with the discernment of an individualistic mindset in everyday life in order to transcend the negative impact of their perceived cultural baggage by crossing beyond limits of cultural confines, and came to terms with the redefinition of a newly prescribed self-concept so as to unfold the discovery of a transpersonal sense of self-transformation.