Due to globalization, the number of internationally mobile business people has increased. As work goes global, more expatriates and their families are in transitions, either in expatriation or repatriation. An expatriate family is defined as a family with children, which has moved abroad because of a parent’s global work. An expatriate child is a child of that family, whom has called also a Third Culture Kid (TCK). This paper aims to answer to the question, what kinds of experiences children have on their identity in expatriation and repatriation contexts. Children’s expatriate experience is divided in three dimensions: emotional, social and cognitive dimensions (e.g. Illeris 2002). In this paper, identity is perceived as being the main construct of the cognitive dimension. Considering expatriate children’s identity, socially constructed categories of ethnicity and nationality are explicit, but the category of social class is also present at identity negotiations. While there is an intersection of categories, in this paper the viewpoint is on cultural - or to be exact intercultural - identity. The theoretical framework of this paper is mainly located on Kim’s (2008) idea of intercultural identity in her integrative theory of cross-cultural adaptation. She critiques the static perspective on cultural identity and emphasizes the complex and evolving nature of identity and its systemic account. Expatriate children are negotiating their identity situationally. Their hybrid identity is not simply bond with one or the other culture, but more like shifting in-between. An innovative self-report measure was constructed due to a need for a self-report identity measure for children. There were two practical targets for the measure: to be easy to use for children and to take into consideration, not just the intercultural, but also the situational nature of identity. In this scale, interculturalness is seen concretely by a space between flags at both ends of the scale. There are three situations - home, school and another significant place - in expatriation context and three in repatriation context, where the child has to ponder, where her/his identity is situated on a 9-point scale (from Finnish 4 to e.g. American 4). The general aim for constructing this self-report method was to see, how children can use this kind of a measure in self-evaluating their identity. The more specific aims were to get a concrete view, whether an individual child has situational variation in her/his identity or not, and whether she/he operates only on one side of the scale or on both sides. It was not an objective to get comparable data between individuals.

Data about children’s intercultural identity was gathered as a part of an interview in summer 2009 by this novel self-report measure. This self-report method is supplementing interviewing, not a separate method, and it is more qualitative than quantitative in its approach. Expatriate children (N = 8) were at the age of 9 – 15 years and most of them (N = 6) were girls.

Preliminary results of this self-report measure indicate that children of various ages can nicely utilize this kind of a self-report measure. However, it has to be pointed out that there was a 9-year-old girl, Emma, who expressed her critical opinion on this measure. Also the situational nature of children’s identity negotiations was caught: there were variation in every child’s self-evaluations meaning that their situational identity varies across time and place. The main finding concerning children’s identity was that there were two separate groups: a monocultural/Finnish group and a hybrid/intercultural group. The first group was operating only on one side and the latter on both sides of the scale. In conclusion, expatriate children had more or less intercultural identities - a sense of in-betweenness, and they were negotiating their identities situationally. Further research is needed to confirm utilization of this self-report measure for intercultural identity. Discussing results, expatriate children present a special type of cultural diversity in school context, which can be silent and covert. Typically, intercultural education is targeted at students with traditional migrant background. The need to broaden intercultural education to encompass all types of cultural diversity and to nurture every student’s cultural identity is grounded.