Becoming a Team: Individualism, Collectivism, Ethnicity, and Group Socialization in Los Angeles Girls' Basketball

We utilize the concepts of individualism and collectivism (or communitarianism) to understand group differences and longitudinal change in what it means to belong to a team, itself a communal context. Our setting is two multiethnic high school girls' basketball teams in southern California. Players were asked to keep journals documenting experiences of interpersonal harmony and conflict in the team setting. Earlier analysis indicated that the experience of playing on a team made players more collectivistic in response to a values questionnaire. How did this change come about? Here we use player journals to answer this question. The journals also show that the process of value change differs depending on whether players interpret the issues surrounding team building through an individualistic or a collectivistic lens. Individualistic journals were more likely to be written by players having at least one European American or African American parent and by Asian American and Latina players having at least one parent born in the United States, whereas they were less likely to be written by Asian American or Latina players from purely immigrant families. However, perhaps because of the situational press towards collectivism in the team context, a collectivistic orientation in player journals was not associated with a particular set of ethnic backgrounds.