Thanks Mom

Whenever I talk to my mom everything seems to become abundantly clear. I was talking to her the other day about my research paper problems, and she said, "Well, why don't you talk about how you can be American by passport, but not by culture?"

And suddenly everything made sense. 

Now I'm researching the phenomenon of Third Culture Kids (see http://tckid.com/what-is-a-tck.html for more information) and what constitutes their national identity. 

I've personally been struggling with this idea, because I'm American by passport, but not necessarily by culture. I'm European and Dutch in many ways, but I'm technically from the U.S. 

This is something that I know that a lot of from friends from other DoDDs schools (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Defense_Dependents_Schools for more information) that are also struggling with this because they have lived in Germany, or Turkey, or The Netherlands for a long time, and they are a part of that culture. Now you'd think that moving back to the States would be coming home, when in fact they are undergoing culture shock. 

Since there's a lot of research on Third Culture Kids, but not necessarily on what constitutes national identity (is it your citizenship, how involved you are in the culture, if you speak the language, etc...), I've emailed a lot of my friends from DoDDs (120 to be exact), whether they be out of Europe for years now and married with kids, going through culture shock, or still in Europe, and asked them to take a survey of mine. This survey will really be the meat of my research, talking with kids who have gone through this and what they think about it. 

I just emailed them last night, and I've already received 10 full responses, and 5 kids said they would soon. 

Needless to say, I'm excited to find the correlations between my friends responses and find an answer not only for myself, but for them as well. Many of the have said they'd love to read the paper when I'm finished with it. 

So, Thanks Mom. Everything is falling into place.