Literature Review on Asian/Asian American Children and Their Families in Poverty

• In Event: Exploring the Multidimensional Experiences of Asian American Children and Families in Educational Contexts

Abstract

Asian American groups are one of the fastest growing racial/ethnic groups, projected to become the nation’s largest immigrant group by 2065 (38% Asians, 31 Hispanics, 9 % Blacks, and 20% White) (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021). At the same time, about 2 million Asian Americans are living in poverty (AAPI Data, 2017). For example, there is also a rapidly growing number of Asian Americans experiencing homelessness, but that is an underrecognized insecurity in the housing of Asian Americans (Chang et al., 2023). Although there exist a few scattered literatures on Asian Americans, the literature tends to focus on youth, adolescents, and elders rather than young children. Little known about poverty among Asian American children and their families in early childhood education.
Raising a question about the dominant discourses related to social class concerning Asian American children and their families, this presentation explores poverty among Asian Americans in early childhood education literature published in journals of early childhood education fields between 2000 and 2023. The presentation will highlight the scarcity of literature on Asian American children and their families in poverty within early childhood education. Through a systematic literature review, empirical studies published in journals over the past 20 years are examined.
In the study, the top two journals were identified as having the most significant number of articles addressing poverty compared to any other early childhood education field. Out of several journals in different disciplines, Early Childhood Education Journal (ECEJ) and Early Childhood Research Quarterly (ECRQ) were identified as the top two journals with the most studies related to poverty in the early childhood education field. Initially, peer-reviewed articles were sought via EBSCO with the following criterion: peer-revised articles published in academic journals 1) in English, 2) in the U.S. as geography, 3) research period between 2000 and 2023, and 4) articles including the key terms such as ‘poverty’, ‘low-income,’ ‘low socioeconomic,’ or ‘disadvantaged,’ With the criterion, the search results show that there are over 200,000 peer-reviewed articles. In the results, 18 empirical studies were selected for the analysis.
The study found that the small number of studies in the two journals indicates a significant scarcity of research on Asian American children in poverty within the field of early childhood education. First, while the studies in these journals addressed poverty among Asian American children and their families, the scope of race/ethnicity tended to be limited to Chinese immigrant children and their families. Second, the empirical studies often highlighted the experiences of Asian American children in poverty through the perspectives of their parents rather than directly from the children themselves. Third, scholars pointed out that there is not only insufficient data on Asians and Asian Americans in poverty, but also that the data has often been aggregated (Lee, 2014; Takei & Sakamoto, 2011; Toji & Johnson, 2014). This lack of disaggregated data is not exceptional in these journals. The presentation will provide significant implications for future researchers and educators in early childhood education.

Author

• Jinhee Kim, Kennesaw State University