The cultural hybridity of Lena: A multi-method case study of a third culture kid

This study used a multi-method case study to explore the central paradox of global nomadism, that cultural hybrids seem at home in any cultural context, but feel at home only among others with a similar cultural history. The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) was used to provide a psychometric profile of Lena, an Adult Third Culture Kid. Lena presented an atypical and theoretically impossible IDI profile, simultaneously ethnocentric, with issues in Minimization, yet clearly ethnorelative, with no issue evident on the AA or EM scales. A series of in-depth interviews were conducted to explore these IDI results, their implications for the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS), which is the theoretical basis for the IDI, and whether they helped to explain the paradox of global nomadism. The interviews helped Lena to realise that although she was surrounded by people from different national backgrounds throughout her life, their shared cultural experience was stronger than their surface differences, resulting in a Minimization orientation of ‘beneath our superficial differences, people are basically all the same’.