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The story of 13-year-old B, a female adolescent with self-harming behavior, and her father and other family members, shows the importance and impact of multicultural factors both in early child development and in establishing identity in adolescence. Born from a mixed marriage between an English mother and a Bulgarian father, B experiences a series of traumatic separations arising from clashes between the expectations and values of her parents’ respective cultures. Presented in a series of distinct episodes, B’s story illustrates the impact of the values conflicts arising in the context of our increasingly multicultural society, and the role of cross-cultural psychology in values-informed family therapy aimed at addressing such conflicts.

Russia, which remains home to several hundred ethnic groups and fourteen linguistic families, inherited much of the Soviet Union’s legacy with respect to ethnic and linguistic categorization. The policies of categorization and official recognition of various ethnic and linguistic groups continue to influence these identities in the Russian Federation. The Russian state paid due attention to ethnicity and linguistic diversity and largely ignored the racial diversity of its population mainly due to the fact that classifications of the racial composition of the country crisscrossed ethnic and linguistic divisions and, unlike ethnicity, did not form the basis for political mobilization. This chapter details such issues as the variation of ethnic designations in official documents and mixed marriage research; the official categorization of the country’s population in censuses, particularly in the first post-Soviet population census of 2002; Russian academic research traditions in ethnicity studies, as well as current approaches to the problem of categorization and official recognition and the use in administrative practices of ‘mixed’ (in terms of ethnic and language affiliation) categories.

This chapter challenges the view that the persistence of macro-social division is a product of unchanging identities. It presents a type of experiment. It takes very similar mixed marriage individuals who are as if immune to ethnic solidarity in three contrasting research sites and compares their narratives of identity change. If division is a product of unchanging ethnic identities, then these ‘non-ethnic’ respondents should narrate similar processes of change in each research site. If it is due to socio-cultural obstacles to sustaining change, then the Northern Ireland respondents should narrate much greater difficulties than the others. The latter is the case. Identity change is difficult to sustain in divided societies even for the most open of individuals because it involves challenging and changing basic values and assumptions without institutional support or cultural signposts. Social division persists not because identity is static but because it changes, and the identity changes cannot be sustained.

The demographic study of the American Jewish community conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2013 remained the subject of intense discussion as scholars reanalyzed the data to trace patterns of mixed marriage, late marriage, and attitudes toward Israel and Jewish peoplehood. Certain actions of the Israeli government—the bombardment of Gazan civilians in the summer war against Hamas, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s acceptance of an invitation to speak before a joint session of Congress, without President Obama’s knowledge, about the threat of a nuclear Iran, and Netanyahu’s pre-election statements that there would be no two-state solution on his watch and that Arab voters were being “bused in” to defeat him—drew the administration’s ire and that of many American Jews. On the religious front, the non-Orthodox denominations came increasingly to resemble each other as Conservative rabbis moved closer to endorsing officiation at mixed marriages.