Educational Attainment and Civic Participation among Second Generation Immigrants: The Importance of Social Embeddedness during Adolescence

• In Event: 435 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Immigration and Education

Abstract

Within the United States, nearly all growth in the young adult population over the next forty years will come from immigrants and their U.S.-born children. While many immigrant youth face similar challenges, they also vary substantially in their access to family and institutional resources which may influence their ability to make a successful transition to adulthood. Utilizing national, longitudinal data from the adolescent (2002/2004), young adult follow-up (2006) and later adult follow-up (2012) surveys of the Educational Longitudinal Study (U.S. Department of Education), this study examines whether differences in the degree to which second generation immigrant youth are rooted in significant social relationships with parents, peers, teachers and in their communities influences later educational attainment and civic participation in adulthood. The results suggest immigrant adolescence who are socially embedded within their family, peer, school and community have higher educational attainment and are more civically engaged ten years later in adulthood. In particular, being connected to more academic oriented peers, having better communication with parents, more positive relationships with teachers and participating in community service during high school has a significant impact on educational attainment 10 years later, even after controlling for a host of individual, family and neighborhood factors. The findings also show that the relationship between social embeddedness and adult outcomes is heavily mediated by early education, work and family formation patterns, which suggests that embeddedness may be particularly advantageous for immigrant youth in the early transition to adulthood by setting a path toward educational success.

Authors

• Joanna Wu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Christy L. Lleras, University of Illinois