Projective Tests
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Pacific Islander Youth Kaikok Lim
Pacific Islanders represent 874,000 people in the United States (U.S.), or approximately 0.3% of the total population. The term ‘‘Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander’’ is used in the 2000 U.S. Census to refer to people who have origins from Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands, namely the Polynesian, Micronesian, and Melanesian range of islands. Although China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan are countries with islands bordering the Pacific Ocean, the people that have origins from these countries are considered Asian. Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Guamanian or Chamorro, Tongan, Fijian, and Marshallese constitute the largest groups of Pacific Islanders in the U.S. today. As a group, they have very diverse languages and cultures. Around 44% speak a language other than English at home, compared with 18% of the total population. Economic and higher educational attainments are below average for Pacific Islanders. Only 14% who are 25 years and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher education, compared with 24% of the total population. In the U.S. today, over half of the total population of Pacific Islanders tends to concentrate in the states of Hawaii and California. Pacific Islander youths, those under 18 years old, constitute 35.6% of the group. Pacific Islanders are currently one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the U.S. For many years, Pacific Islanders were grouped with other Asian Americans; thus the specific problems facing Pacific Islander youth were not made apparent. Now, categorized as a separate group, the three main issues of school performance, substance abuse, and youth violence, are becoming clearer and raise alarm about the need to better serve this group. Pacific Islander youth have low academic success, which has been underreported in the past. Lower parental expectations in pursuing education beyond high
school can translate to lower educational aspirations in Pacific Islander youth. Limited educational achievement would perpetuate the current economic standing of Pacific Islanders, who rank lower than average compared with the total population. As Pacific Islander youth become assimilated into mainstream American culture, there are higher proportions of substance abuse within the group. There are more Pacific Islander females who abuse substances, than males within the Pacific Islander group. Studies of youth violence have discovered that Pacific Islander youth tend to engage in more violent behavior than was previously estimated. Grouping Pacific Islander youth with other Asian American youth as one homogeneous category appears to have skewed data and underestimated the prevalence of violence. When Pacific Islander youths acculturate to the dominant Western culture and explore values of individualism, they often experiment with deviant behaviors as a means of establishing themselves as a separate entity. However, those youths who hold bicultural self-efficacy are less inclined to engage in violent behaviors, showing the capacity to
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