Do Immigrant Parents Practice Concerted Cultivation? Comparative Evidence from Los Angeles

• In Event: 2484 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Cultural Capital

Abstract

Research shows that children of college educated parents access class resources in the family home that ensure their socioeconomic mobility. But although college educated immigrant parents--those who arrive with foreign degrees--develop their class resources in societies and education systems different from those where they raise children, scholars have not fully explained how their class resources actually transfer between the societies where they acquired them, and those where they activate them. I address this omission by drawing on original, multi-method fieldwork to compare college preparation strategies practiced by immigrant parents who completed college in Iran and Armenia, with those practiced by native-born college educated parents. I find that although they converge with native-born parents in cognitive aspects of culture, such as in educational expectations, ultimately immigrant parents’ ability to transmit symbolic values of education in college preparation to their high-school age children is limited as a result of migration. I discuss cultural implications for immigrant intergenerational mobility and conclude that cultural reproduction among college-educated immigrants is more complex than it is among the native-born due to an inconsistency between educational fields where parental habitus is acquired and where it is activated, what I call field discontinuity.

Author

• Oshin Khachikian, University of California-Irvine