Academic Resilience of Latino/a College Students from Single-parent Households

• In Event: 282 - Student Forum Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 02. Schools, Violence, and Academic Resilience

Abstract

Approximately 25 million students in the United States come from single-parent households, 28 percent of which are Hispanic (National KIDS Count, 2014). Single-parent households can adds academic and social barriers. Additionally being Latino creates unique, additional challenges. Yet, despite that, many remain resilient and academically successful. Eleven successful, Latino college students from single-parent households were interviewed to examine how they overcome these struggles and remain resilient in college. The research focused on the contributing factors that fostered resilience. We discovered that most of the participants had a difficult transition going from high school to college atmosphere because of their first generation status and their ethnicity. Overall, we found that all of the participants found resilience in different ways. Participants turned many of those barriers into positive motivating factors. The participants’ ethnicity and their socioeconomic status greatly influences and motivated their resilience in college. However,confirming previous research, single-parent household was the most common and uniform factor in academic resilience.

Authors

• Damian Almaraz

• Jennifer Galan, University of Illinois Chicago