Cultural identity as worldviews: A natural experiment with maya adolescents before and after community adoption of digital communication.

Abstract

The spread of digital communication around the globe has raised questions about the nature of digitally mediated cultural identity and how worldviews are constructed in the context of permeable and dynamic communities less tethered to physical geography. To expand research on the impacts of digital communication on cultural identity development among adolescents in the Majority World, the present study compared the worldviews of indigenous Maya adolescents before and after the Internet and mobile devices became widely used in their community. Adolescents were interviewed in 2009 (N = 80; 40 girls, M_age = 16.94) and in 2018 (N = 79; 44 girls, M_age = 15.91) using eight vignettes that were developed from ethnographic work in the community and designed to elicit participants' cultural beliefs and values. In each story, one character articulates a traditional, collectivistic worldview, and another articulates a Western, individualistic worldview present in the community. Participants were asked who they agreed with and why, and responses were analyzed quantitatively (pattern of character endorsements) and qualitatively (frameworks of meaning). Analysis of covariance showed no differences in character endorsements across the two cohorts. Schooling, not the use of mobile devices or social media, uniquely predicted alignment with individualistic characters in regression analyses. Although individualistic values did not increase, qualitative analyses of frameworks of meaning showed that adolescents in the two cohorts differed in how they integrated individualistic and collectivistic perspectives. The study demonstrates the importance of locally relevant mixed methods for understanding changes in the contents of cultural identity over historical time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).