The Impact of Family Support and Identity Compatibility on First-Generation College Student Performance

• In Event: 46.085 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 46.085-9 - Educational Attainment and the Social Class Divide: Sociopsychological Barriers to Equality and Justice

Abstract

Objectives
As the first in their families to attend college, first-generation college students confront cultural discrepancies between their working-class home environment and the middle-class university environment (Stephens et al., 2012). Consequently, compared to non-first-generation college students (i.e., students with at least one college-graduated parent), first-generation college students experience more conflicts in managing their home and school identities (Lubrano, 2003) that might undermine their identification and performance in college. Importantly, consistent with reflected appraisals research (Frome & Eccles, 1998), managing these identities may be influenced by perceptions of family support: while some first-generation college students receive moral and academic support for attending college, others may receive only moral support but no academic support. The proposed research extends theory in racial-ethnic identities (Oyserman et al., 2003) with first-generation college students, and explores how family support shapes first-generation college students’ identity compatibility and subsequent performance. We reason that receiving moral and academic support fosters more compatibility between home and school identities, while receiving moral but no academic support facilitates less compatibility between these identities. Moreover, consistent with past work (Benet-Martinez et al., 2002), we argue that identity compatibility will be positively related to performance.

Methods and data
One hundred twenty-one university students (60 first-generation, 61 non-first-generation) participated in an online study. Students completed open-ended and close-ended measures of perceived academic support (e.g., My parents taught me what to expect in college academically) and moral support (e.g., My parents are happy that I am attending college). Students also completed a measure of identity compatibility (e.g., I feel like the values of my family are compatible with the values at the University). Official university semester grades were collected for each student.

Results
Analyses revealed that, as predicted, first-generation college students reported perceiving less academic support than non-first-generation college students on both open-ended and close-ended measures. There were no differences in perceptions of moral support. Moreover, first-generation college students who perceived moral but no academic support earned lower grades than first-generation college students who perceived moral and academic support and lower grades than non-first-generation college students regardless of support. Finally, mediated moderation analyses revealed that, as expected, perceiving moral but no academic support led to less identity compatibility, which led to lower grades for first-generation college students. This was not the case for non-first-generation college students for whom parental support or identity compatibility had no effect on grades.

Significance
As the number of first-generation college students increases on college campuses (Bowen et al., 2005), so does the need to understand the unique issues, including identity-based obstacles, that impact their performance. The current findings shed light on how perceived family support can impact how first-generation college students manage their identities and, subsequently, perform in school. As such, these findings can importantly inform strategies for improving retention and graduation of this academically vulnerable and economically diverse student population.

Authors

• Rebecca Covarrubias, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Chad Forbes, University of Delaware