Browsing by Author "Gabriel, Oscar W. (Prof. Dr. rer. pol.)"

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Open Access
Identity security: a quantitative approach for explaining the integration of receiving populations, immigrants, and ethnic minorities in Europe
(2009) Hapke, Yvonne; Gabriel, Oscar W. (Prof. Dr. rer. pol.)
In the context of rather emotional debates on integration, this work set out to explore the relationship between personal security - as framed in the security of a person's self-perception - and an attitudinal perspective on individuals' social and political integration. The theoretical base was constructed by linking social identity theory and identity theory - two influential schools of identity research of which the first comes from the discipline of social psychology and the second from sociology. Both share the focus on the individual in the context of the social world. The security of a person's self-perception (identity security) was thereby understood as the positive and certain feeling about oneself, which is related to the certainty of one's self-concept in terms of the self-knowledge of what one is and what one does. Security of one's self-perception was then addressed as the satisfaction of identity principles, the general cognitive ability to construct and reconstruct identity, and the opportunity to self-verify. It was conceptualized through the presence of identity resources and the absence of identity threats - both aspects relating to identity principles, cognitive ability, and self-verification. It was hypothesized that identity security would support a person's ability to get along with others and would increase its ties to the social and political system of one's present country of residence (integration). Xenophobia, identity denial, and the salience of religious identity as non-adaptive responses to threatened identity should relate negatively to integration.