Minority ingroup identification : the disease and the antidote

The research at hand explores the role of ingroup identification in mediating the relationship between minority group members’ experiences of outgroup rejection and well-being, mainly by revisiting the rejection identification model introduced by Branscombe, Schmitt, and Harvey (1999), and testing it in actual real-life contexts where minorities suffer outgroup rejection in the process and aftermath of conflicts, migration, and asylum seeking. In contrast to the rejection idetification model, we expect that minority in-group identification is associated with psychological distress. Contrary to our predictions , the results of the studies were non-consistent across social samples and to a certain extent were hard to interpret. Although the results confirmed that the relationship between perceived discrimination and psychological distress was still positive even after the inclusion of ingroup identification as a mediator of the relationship, the overall mediation across the different studies ranged from partial, full, and insignificant.