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Introduction
Because of migration and ethnic diversity, the twenty-first century has presented many countries with a challenging multicultural environment. Specially, there is a call for more studies to understand bicultural consumers and the impact of their acculturation practices on contemporary consumption behaviour. This study focuses on the gift-giving context. Gift giving can be seen as a language that uses objects and a place where people tend to create their own complex realities (Caplow, 1984). Furthermore, gift giving is a universal and a rich context to conduct consumer behaviour research (Belk, 1976). Gift-giving rituals have been studied extensively in the past few decades, but few studies have examined it from the perspective of bicultural consumers.
To date, the existing research on gift giving has focused on several areas:
* how situational dimensions affect gift exchange (Belk and Coon, 1993);
* how motivations influence gift selection (Goodwin et al. , 1990);
* how different types of receivers are related to the choice of gifts (Otnes et al. , 1993); and
* how gift giving contributes to the realignment of relationships (Ruth et al. , 1999).
Recently, researchers have also been increasingly interested in online gift-giving contexts (Lampel and Bhalla, 2007; Hollenbeck et al. , 2006), Christmas gift-giving (Clarke, 2006) and cross-cultural gift-giving practices (Lotz et al. , 2003).
The rich phenomenon of gift giving from the perspective of bicultural consumers is yet to be investigated. This is an important area to pursue by consumer researchers. This paper focuses at the crossroad of gift giving and acculturation research to understand not only changes in cultural practices but also the underlying drivers of these practices.
Research objectives and research questions
This study takes into account the cultural and ethnic factors which intersect and intertwine with the lifestyle and consumption behaviour of immigrants in a new country. When migrating to a new society, ethnic groups will experience the new cultural traits of the host country while maintaining their original ethnic identity (Laroche et al. , 1996). Scholars have called for studies to offer in-depth understandings of this phenomenon within broader socio-cultural discourses (Penaloza, 1994; Oswald, 1999; Luedicke, 2011; Askegaard and Ozcaglar-Toulouse, 2011). It is important to note that changes in cultural values that occur over time may be the...