Career decision-making of students with immigrant backgrounds: A community cultural wealth perspective

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Culture and Lifelong Learning

Proposal

Introduction
This explanatory study explores the community cultural wealth of students with immigrant backgrounds and examines the effects of community cultural wealth on their career decision-making. Community cultural wealth refers to the spectrum of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities, and networks owned and harnessed by communities of color to resist oppression at the macro and micro levels (Yosso, 2005). With this framework of asset-based approach, this study is guided by the following research questions. 1) What kind of community cultural wealth do children from immigrant backgrounds have? 2) How does this community cultural wealth affect their career development?

Background
In this study, students with immigrant backgrounds refer to children with parents in international marriages or children from immigrant families living in South Korea. While these students are often called “multicultural youth” in Korean society, the authors decided to use the term “students with immigrant backgrounds” to avoid the discriminatory connotation toward this group (Kim, 2019; Lee & Ham, 2021; Ryu, 2013). As the number of populations with immigrant or multicultural backgrounds increases in Korean society, the number of children from immigrant or multicultural families is also gradually increasing. According to the Ministry of Education, the Republic of Korea, the number of students from immigrant or multicultural families at elementary and secondary levels was 147,378 in 2020. The percentage of students with immigrant backgrounds is expected to increase further in the future.
With this background, many researchers have attempted to investigate these students’ experiences highlighting discrimination against, othering, or isolating these students with immigrant backgrounds. Previous findings about the students with immigrant backgrounds have made valuable contributions to understanding their struggles and designing supportive interventions for these students. In the long term, however, these approaches have a risk of depicting students with immigrant backgrounds with a deficit-oriented view and leading them to greater marginalized and feelings of inferiority. This view could also obscure their strengths and make them feel useless, focusing on what they lack, not what they contribute. Unfortunately, a lack of research highlights the strengths of these students with immigrant backgrounds in Korea. In addition, a dearth of study focuses on the career development process of students with immigrant backgrounds while many scholars investigate their academic achievement (Jo, 2022). To address these gaps, we adapt an asset-based framework through community cultural wealth to explore the strengths of the students with immigrant backgrounds and the roles of these assets in their career development.

Theoretical Framework
Yosso (2005) developed the community cultural wealth framework using critical race theory and the traditional concept of Bourdieu’s cultural capital. While Bourdieu’s concept of capital only focuses on the resources monopolized by the dominant group, Yosso (2005) expanded the viewpoint toward the capital to encompass the unique cultural resources of students of color. In this vein, this theoretical framework is significant in that it highlights the capital of marginalized groups, which has been devalued or overlooked in the traditional approach to cultural or social capital (Holland, 2017).
Community cultural wealth encompasses six components–aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resistant–all of which interact in dynamic processes rather than being mutually exclusive (Yosso, 2005). These six forms of capital are developed and nurtured by the families and communities where students of color grow up (Villalpando & Solórzano, 2005). However, there is a dearth of research about the community cultural wealth of adolescents from immigrant families in South Korea. Therefore, this study is attempting to apply the existing asset-based framework, predominantly used in the U.S. background, to the diverse student population in South Korea, pursuing comparative study implications. In addition, most research about community cultural wealth was conducted with qualitative data. However, this study is attempting to extend this tool to a quantitative data source, which could lead to the methodological contribution of this study.

Method
Sample and Data Sources
We used the data of the Multicultural Adolescents Panel Study (MAPS) collected by the National Youth Policy Institute, Republic of Korea. This panel data consists of survey responses from multicultural youth and their parents since 2011 and conducted cross-sectional surveys for nine years until 2019. The survey investigates various areas such as background characteristics, school life, social psychological adaptation, physical development, parent-child relationship, and policy support. To address our research questions, we only used the ninth wave of student data which consists of the survey responses from senior students in high school. The total number of samples is 1,146 after we treated the missing data.

Analysis
We conducted a descriptive statistical analysis and linear regression to explore the community cultural wealth of adolescents with immigrant backgrounds and examine the effects of community cultural wealth on their career development. We developed the variables from the survey items representing their demographic information. The responses representing each linguistic, familial, social, navigational, aspirational, and resistant capital were used as primary independent variables. In addition, we used the responses about their career decision-making as the dependent variable.

Preliminary findings
Data suggests that adolescents with immigrant backgrounds have community cultural wealth, including familial capital, social capital, navigational capital, resistant capital, and aspirational capital. Descriptive statistics show that most students with immigrant backgrounds possess the components of community cultural wealth. We also found that there were significant effects of five components of community cultural capital out of six components (except linguistic capital) on the career decision-making of students with immigrant backgrounds. After we added the control variables, such as individual backgrounds, including parents’ education or subjective income level, familial, social, navigational, aspirational, and resistant capitals significantly showed a positive effect on career decision-making.

Conclusion and Implication
Through this study, we could discover their community cultural wealth, including their familiar, navigational, social, aspirational, and resistance capital owned by students with immigrant backgrounds. We also found that their community cultural wealth significantly affected their career decision-making. These results imply that policymakers and educators should transform the support system and curriculum to promote an environment where students with immigrant backgrounds can contribute to the community with their assets.

Authors

• Seyoung Hong, Michigan State University

• Eun Jung Paik, Pennsylvania State University