Commentary | Special Issue: Acculturation Reimagined

Unpacking the integration puzzle: Overlooked insights from meta-analytical research. A response to Berry (2025)

https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00043
Published: November 11, 2025
Copyright: The authors (CC BY 4.0)

Bierwiaczonek, K. (2025). Unpacking the integration puzzle: Overlooked insights from meta-analytical research. A response to Berry (2025). advances.in/psychology, 2, e02431. https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00043

Bierwiaczonek, Kinga. "Unpacking the integration puzzle: Overlooked insights from meta-analytical research. A response to Berry (2025)." advances.in/psychology, vol. 2, no. 1, 2025, e02431. https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00043.

Bierwiaczonek, Kinga. 2025. "Unpacking the integration puzzle: Overlooked insights from meta-analytical research. A response to Berry (2025)." advances.in/psychology 2 (1): e02431. https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00043.

Bierwiaczonek K. Unpacking the integration puzzle: Overlooked insights from meta-analytical research. A response to Berry (2025). advances.in/psychology. 2025;2(1):e02431. doi:10.56296/aip00043.

Bierwiaczonek, K. (2025) 'Unpacking the integration puzzle: Overlooked insights from meta-analytical research. A response to Berry (2025)', advances.in/psychology, 2(1), e02431. Available at: https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00043.

Download .RIS Download .bib

In his commentary on the special issue “Acculturation reimagined”, Berry (2025) puts forward several criticisms of our study published in this issue (Vu & Bierwiaczonek, 2025). Yet, Berry’s criticism of our outdated binary approach to acculturation fails to acknowledge that, as any meta-analysis, our study reflects the limitations of the meta-analyzed data, most of which come from projects led by Berry himself. Further, Berry’s criticism of the interaction term as an operationalization of integration misrepresents what interaction is, and confuses our meta-analytical test of individual-level moderation with study-level moderation and primary data analysis. Instead of dismissing the obvious weaknesses of meta-analytical evidence on integration using misplaced arguments, the acculturation field should seriously consider two insights largely overlooked in the integration debate. First, based on our previous work, the positive effects attributed to integration are mainly driven by mainstream culture orientation, while their heterogeneity can be attributed to heritage culture orientation. Second, based on my reanalysis of Grigoryev et al. (2023) that disentangled four levels of effect variability (variability due to sampling error, to methods, to sample characteristics, and to country contexts), this heterogeneity is unlikely to originate primarily from differences between receiving country contexts, and its true causes remain unknown.

No citation data available yet.

Download PDF Back to article