Teacher ratings of Hispanic,black, and Anglo students' classroom behavior

Teachers rated the behavior of Hispanic (N = 56), black (N = 56), and Anglo (N = 56) elementary students with the Teacher Checklist of School Behavior. The behavior of Hispanic students was rated less favorably than that of either of the other two groups. The Hispanic students were perceived to avoid peer and teacher interaction to a greater extent than Anglo and black students and to exhibit more physical reaction (absenteeism, physical complaints, clinic requests, etc.)     

PSYCHOLOGICAL ACCULTURATION: DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW MEASURE FOR PUERTO RICANS ON THE U.S. MAINLAND

Most instruments designed to measure acculturation have relied on specific cultural behaviors and preferences as primary indicators of acculturation. In contrast, feelings of belonging and emotional attachment to cultural communities have not been widely used. The Psychological Acculturation Scale (PAS) was developed to assess acculturation from a phenomenological perspective, with items pertaining to the individual's sense of psychological attachment to and belonging within the Anglo-American and Latino/Hispanic cultures. Responses from samples of bilingual individuals and Puerto Rican adolescents and adults are used to establish a high degree of measurement equivalence across the Spanish and English versions of the scale along with high levels of internal consistency and construct validity. The usefulness of the PAS and the importance of studying acculturation from a phenomenological perspective are discussed.     

The Role of Intragroup Marginalization in Latino College Student Adjustment

The purpose of this article is to examine how intragroup marginalization has a potential impact on Latino college students’ psychological adjustment. The concept of intragroup marginalization in this context relates to the perceived rejection of students by persons of their heritage culture group in response to the students’ acculturation efforts in regard to the college culture. Counselors can facilitate college success of Latino students by addressing acculturative stressors. Intragroup marginalization and its relationship to Latino college student adjustment is illustrated and discussed through a vignette.     

Predicting the Use of Campus Counseling Services for Asian/Pacific Islander,Latino/Hispanic,and White Students: Problem Severity,Gender, and Generational Status

The purpose of the current study was to identify predictors of counseling center use among Asian/Pacific Islander, Latino/Hispanic, and White college students. Findings indicated that female and 2nd‐generation students report the most severe difficulties. Problem severity and gender predicted counseling center use for White and Asian/Pacific Islander students, whereas only problem severity predicted use for Latino/Hispanic students. Generational status was not a significant predictor of use for any group.     

Reconstructing culture: the promises and challenges as articulated by Latino/a youth

This qualitative study examines how a group of Latino/a high school students living in the Southeast used youth media as a forum to promote a selective pattern of acculturation. The study explores the ways in which the students’ discourse emphasised the maintenance of the students’ home culture and privileged familismo, a cultural construct that holds the needs of the family above the needs of the individual. The doubly precarious issue of gender and biculturalism is examined, and found to be problematic for the female participants who personally struggled with a patriarchal family structure, yet publically promoted family loyalty and respect. The study highlights the female participants’ challenges and the importance of providing a space to examine these challenges.     

An investigation into the academic acculturation experiences of Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong

Over the past few decades, Mainland China has witnessed a massive outflow of students to higher education institutions in Hong Kong. In the context of an up-surge in Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong, this research aims to explore (1) why Mainland Chinese students choose to study in Hong Kong over other higher education systems, (2) perceptions about the advantages and disadvantages of studying in Hong Kong, and (3) challenges in the process of acculturation from their homeland to Hong Kong. Five key themes are identified: education, finance, learning culture, language, and discrimination/labelling. While Mainland Chinese students often struggle to blend into the new environment, most gradually become accustomed to the local way of life. What remains a challenge is (perceived) discrimination following political tensions over the “one China, two systems” framework. This paper identifies the expectations and dissatisfactions of the participants with regard to studying in Hong Kong, ultimately offering higher-education administrators an insight into how to better cater for the expanding share of Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong’s universities. This research is significant because it extends the literature by examining acculturation and cultural adaptation issues in an increasingly globalized context.     

Mothers' Acculturation and Beliefs About Emotions,Mother–Child Emotion Discourse,and Children's Emotion Understanding in Latino Families

Research Findings: We examined associations among Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, maternal beliefs, mother–child emotion talk, and emotion understanding in 40 Latino preschool-age children and their mothers. Mothers self-reported Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, and beliefs about the value/danger of children's emotions and parent/child roles in emotion socialization. Mother–child emotion talk was observed during a Lego storytelling task. Children's emotion understanding was measured using 2 age-appropriate tasks. Correlations showed that mothers' Latino enculturation was associated with mothers' stronger belief in guiding children's emotions and children's lower emotion understanding. Anglo acculturation was associated with mothers' lower belief that emotions can be dangerous and children's better emotion understanding. Mothers with a stronger belief in guiding children's emotions more frequently labeled emotions. Mothers with a stronger belief that emotions can be dangerous less frequently explained emotions. Regressions controlling for child age and maternal education demonstrated that mothers with a stronger belief that children can learn about emotions on their own and mothers with greater Latino enculturation had children with lower emotion understanding, whereas mothers with greater Anglo acculturation had children with better emotion understanding. Practice or Policy: Results suggest that understanding both family acculturation and family enculturation will be helpful for early childhood researchers and educators seeking to assess and promote children's socioemotional development.     

Discrimination‐Related Stress Effects on the Development of Internalizing Symptoms Among Latino Adolescents

This three‐wave longitudinal study of 173 Latino adolescents (M = 16.16 years, SD = 0.65) is designed to understand the role of discrimination‐related stress in mental health trajectories during middle to late adolescence with attention to differences due to immigration status. The results of the growth curve analysis showed that anxious‐depressed, withdrawn‐depressed, and somatic complaints significantly decreased over time. Furthermore, although discrimination‐related stress was found to be significantly related to the trajectories of three types of mental health symptoms, the results revealed that immigration status moderated these relations such that discrimination‐related stress was significantly related to these outcomes for Latino youth whose parents were born in the United States, while this relation was not significant for Latino children of immigrants.     

Making Our Way Through: Voices of Hispanic Counselor Educators

Through 23 open‐ended questionnaires and 8 individual interviews, this phenomenological study explored the experiences of Hispanic men and women (N = 23) who completed doctoral degrees in counselor education. Six themes were identified: family role models, educational support, parental expectations, ethnic identity, acculturation/cultural expectations, and intrinsic motivation.     

The Relationships Among Perfectionism,Acculturation, and Stress in Asian International Students

This study examined relationships among perfectionism, acculturation, and stress in 76 Asian international students. Results showed that perfectionism and acculturation predicted stress, together accounting for 50% of the variance in stress. Furthermore, acculturation explained students' experience of stress above and beyond perfectionism, and 1 specific acculturation variable examined, perceived prejudice, revealed the strongest relationship with stress. Implications for providing counseling services to international students and for future research are described.     

Effects of Mexican Immigrant Parents’ Daily Workplace Discrimination on Child Behavior and Family Functioning

This study investigated Mexican immigrant parents’ reports of perceived workplace discrimination and their children's behavior, parents’ moods, and parent–child interactions. Parents of one hundred and thirty‐eight 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children were asked to complete one survey daily for 2 weeks (N = 1,592 days). On days when fathers perceived discrimination, fathers and mothers reported more externalizing child behaviors, and mothers reported fewer positive child behaviors. When mothers perceived discrimination, they reported more externalizing child behaviors; fathers reported more internalizing child behaviors. Parents reported worse mood on days with perceived discrimination. Perceived discrimination was not strongly related to parent–child interactions. For fathers, but less so for mothers, those whose psychological acculturation indicated separation had more negative relations between daily perceived workplace discrimination and child and family outcomes.     

Cultural Competence Development,Critical Service Learning,and Latino/a Youth Empowerment: A Qualitative Case Study

As universities create service-learning programs, educators are experimenting with pedagogical approaches that enhance learning outcomes while benefiting communities. We present a qualitative case study of a radio-based, service-learning program, grounded in a Freirean foundation and aimed at developing the cultural competence and sense of citizenship of undergraduate students while empowering working-class high school Latino/a students. Undergraduate students benefited the most from the program; they enhanced their cultural competence skills, awareness of social issues, and sense of civic responsibility. Latino/a high school students who stayed in the program for at least a year developed self-confidence, self-esteem, and a sense of self-efficacy.     

Supportive classrooms for Latino English language learners: Grit,ELL status,and the classroom context

Students' academic achievement is the result of the interplay between person-level and contextual factors (R. R: Greene, 2014; D. E. Hunt, 1975). Students perform better when classroom characteristics support their characteristics. The authors examine whether student perceptions of two classroom characteristics (care and control) fit with two Latino student characteristics (English language learner status and grit) in relation to their academic achievement. Using a sample of fourth- and fifth-grade Latino students from the Measures of Effective Teaching dataset (n = 3,272), the authors conducted a series of nested regression models with two- and three-way interactions between student characteristics and student perceptions of classroom characteristics. Findings revealed that grit is most strongly associated with Latino English language learners’ English/language arts achievement when students perceived that teachers used high levels of care and control. We conclude with implications for practitioners.     

Cultural transition and academic achievement of students from ethnic minority backgrounds: a content analysis of empirical research on acculturation

Background: The achievement gap between immigrant and non-immigrant students that has been identified in most OECD countries and the considerable educational dropout rate among students from ethnic minority backgrounds in some countries have become serious challenges for national educational systems. The educational underachievement of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds is embedded in the process of their acculturation. In the tradition of cross-cultural psychology, acculturation describes individual or ethno-cultural group changes in behaviour and attitudes in the situation of intercultural contact. Such cultural changes are central to the experience of ethnic minority students including newly arriving immigrants, children of immigrants and members of marginalised ethnic and racial groups. Acculturation has been described as a stressful process, and acculturation orientations adopted by young people from ethnic minority backgrounds have been shown to have an impact on their adjustment.

Purpose: The school context has been recognised to be the crucial context for acculturation of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds. The academic achievement of these students is thus embedded in the acculturation process, which involves cultural identity development, psychological adjustment and behavioural adjustment. The study is aimed at analysing and systematising the findings of empirical research on acculturation in the school context with a focus on the academic achievement of young people from minority backgrounds.

Design and methods: For this study, 29 peer-reviewed articles from a total of 348 articles that matched the search criteria in the database of the Education Resources Information Centre were selected according to inclusion criteria. The selected articles addressed academic achievement of young people from minority backgrounds in relation to at least one of the issues of acculturation such as cultural identity, psychological adjustment and behavioural adjustment. The articles were analysed by applying the method of qualitative content analysis, using MAXQDA software. The findings presented in the selected articles were analysed and integrated according to a deductively developed and inductively enriched category system.

Conclusions: Overall, the results of our analysis offer insight into issues of acculturation in relation to academic achievement. Moreover, our findings reveal the complexity of the relationship between cultural transition and school adjustment for young people. As shown in our review, although a bi-cultural orientation was predominantly positively related to school adjustment of minority students, some studies also identified assimilative attitudes as advantageous for students’ academic achievement as well as for their psychological and behavioural adjustment. Moreover, our study has also shown that young people’s acculturative attitudes may have a different impact on their school adjustment relative to acculturative behaviours.     

Dynamics of Acculturation, Enculturation, and Ethnic Identity: Influence of Psychocultural Constructs on Conscientiousness and Expectations of Higher Education Among Latinos

This study investigated the influence of psychocultural variables (e.g., acculturation, enculturation, ethnic identity) and personality characteristics in relation to educational expectations among 345 Latino middle school students in the U.S. Results from a path model indicate that 24.4?% of the variance of educational expectations was accounted for by all predictor variables included in the model. Age, acculturation, and conscientiousness had statistically significant direct effects on educational expectations. Findings also show that elements of ethnic identity and conscientiousness mediated the association from acculturation and enculturation to educational expectations. Implications of the findings for counselors are addressed.     

Acculturation and Ecological Worldview Among Latino Americans

Abstract

The authors examined environmental attitudes among foreign-born Latino Americans and differences in these attitudes associated with acculturation. Data were collected from Spanish-speaking students (N = 153) enrolled in 3 levels of English as a second language (ESL) courses and from English-speaking students (N = 39) enrolled in a Spanish as a second language course. Measures included the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) scale, a 4-item acculturation scale, ESL course level, and demographics. Acculturation was negatively related to scores on the NEP scale, and Spanish-speaking students in lower level ESL courses scored higher on the NEP than students in higher level courses. These effects remained significant even when income and education were used as covariates. These findings suggest that culture is an important determinant of environmental attitudes.     

Perceived parental social support and psychological control predict depressive symptoms for lesbian,gay, bisexual,transgender, queer,or questioning youth in the United States

Salient practices in the parenting literature—support and control—have seldom been applied to understanding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (LGBTQ) youth mental health. We examine associations among perceived parental social support, psychological control, and depressive symptoms for LGBTQ youth in the United States (n = 536; M_age = 18.98; 48.1% women; 25.2% Black or African American; 37.1% Hispanic or Latino/a/x). Data were collected in 2011–2012. Results indicated joint effects of social support and psychological control predicting youth depressive symptoms. Multiple group analysis yielded a significant interaction of parenting practices for youth whose parent(s) did not know their LGBTQ identity. Findings support further consideration of parental support and control in relation to LGBTQ youth well-being.     

Dynamic Transition Patterns in Acculturation Among Hispanic Adolescents

Acculturation consists of multiple domains (i.e., cultural practices, identifications, and values). However, less is known about how acculturation processes influence each other across multiple domains of acculturation. This study was designed to investigate transition patterns of acculturative processes within and across domains in a sample of 302 recent-immigrant Hispanic adolescents, M_age (SD) = 14.51 years (0.88) at baseline; male = 53%). Adolescents were assessed six times over a 3-year period. Latent profile analyses identified two profiles (high [or increasing] vs. low) for each domain at each timepoint. We found largely stable transition patterns in each domain over six timepoints. Importantly, sequential associations among profiles in acculturation domains were also detected. Implication for acculturation theory and research are discussed.