Immigrant and Refugee Children and Their Families: Clinical, Research, and Training Issues, Fern J. Cramer Azima and Natalie Grizenko (Eds.),  International University Press, 2002,  244 pp.

Azima and Grizenko's book has a wider scope than its title would suggest. Immigrants, refugees, and their families may be the main protagonists, but the book actually delivers a much broader and encompassing message about cultural diversity. The book's major contribution is in the study of universal psychosocial phenomena that determine the outcomes in human development. It discusses family closeness, parenting, child-rearing practices, conceptualization of time, socioeconomic status, trauma, medical diseases, ethnicity, relatedness to cultural background, inherent “survival” qualities and drives, and their impact on character maturation and progress. In using “immigration” as the object of analysis, the book also serves as an indirect, although close, examination of our “Western cultural bias.” It thus creates a bridge to a more worldly perception of the core mechanisms of individual character evolution. This book provides a valuable learning experience for anyone interested in expanding his or her understanding of the human race.

Immigration provides a natural model for studying human behavior, for which the independent variables differ from setting to setting. What studies have been trying to do is group people according to the independent variables and look at the outcomes. It is a successful model for disproving a null hypothesis; however, it also shows that one can only loosely apply the logic of variables to human interactions. An example in point is Saucier et al.'s study (chapter 7) on the relationship between cultural identity and adaptation to adolescence. It assumes that immigrant teenagers have higher frequency of physical, antisocial, and health-related risk behavior and poor psychological adaptation to adolescence. The study showed that was not true. Socioeconomic status of the family turned out to play a more important role than any other “immigration-related” or “cultural” variable. One variable not addressed in this book at all is the significance o