The basic proposal of this work has to do with the role that school plays in the process of integration of immigrant families in the host society. The study begins by bringing to light that the adaptation profile of the new social context differs considerably depending on whether the family has or does not have children enrolled in school(Santos Rego, 2006 and 2009). What interests us is to explain if the determinants of acceptance or rejection of the cultural keys of the host society are mediated by the fact of the schooling of sons and daughters (Vedder and Horenczyk, 2006).
In this process is found the concept of acculturation – “change produced by contact among individuals and groups of different cultures” (Sam, 2006, p. 11). As occurs with all cultural phenomena, its conceptualization happened due to the introduction of this young term in other dominants in those moments. The most polemic was that of Assimilation, solved in 1974 by Teske and Nelson who stated that it is a process of unidirectional influence in which a group influences another one, while that of acculturation is potentially bidirectional, with the groups in contact mutually influential. 
At any rate, the current intercultural literature has a series of concepts directly related to those we develop in this work (Sam, 2006) such as Interculturation (processes that occur when individuals and groups interact at the same time that they are identified to themselves as culturally different), to Enculturation (which a person learns, absorbed by the context in which he or she lives), the well-known Globalization (the influence of a specific culture on a set of societies and cultures), Multiculturalism (political ideology on how ethnic groups maintain their cultural and ethnic idiosyncrasy) and Ethnic identity (the way that individuals self-define cultural identity in keys of the ethnic group to other groups). All these terms have a common element referred to as the change incidence centre: The individual, the group or both at the same time. Berry (1990) and Sam and Berry (2006) distinguish between both levels, saying that in the group the changes can be appreciated in their social structure, in the economic base and in the political organization, while in the individual they show up in his or her identity, values, attitudes and behaviour, assuming the individual differences present in the four aspects. There is a tacit agreement that correct understanding of the process of acculturation (psychological) involves study of the two levels.
Our work is centered on the individual level in terms of beliefs and attitudes. In a more concrete fashion, on four variables that have proven to be the most relevant, theoretically and statistically speaking, in the previous exploratory analysis (Schmitz, 1994; Liebkind, 2006): personal perception of discrimination, most significant vital changes, beliefs in social participation and perception of unsuitability for labour insertion.

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