Ethnic Discrimination and Latina/o Adolescents’ Academic Adjustment: The Moderating Role of Parental Academic Support

• In Event: 1-129 - Factors that Influence the Experiences of Racial Discrimination: From Individual and Contextual Lenses

Integrative Statement

Ethnic discrimination negatively influences adolescents’ academic adjustment (Benner et al., 2018). Theoretical (e.g., Garcia Coll et al., 1996) and empirical evidence (e.g., DeGarmo & Martinez, 2006) suggests that general parental support can buffer the negative effects of discrimination in relation to adolescents’ academics. Research has shown that parental academic support can positively contribute to Latina/o adolescents’ academic adjustment (Plunkett et al., 2008); however, whether parental academic support can buffer the negative effects of discrimination on academics is unclear. The current study examined the moderating role of two parental academic support behaviors—parents encouraging the adolescent to go college and parents talking to the adolescent about high school/college—on the links between ethnic discrimination with academic adjustment among Latina/o middle school students. We hypothesized that discrimination would be negatively linked to academics, parental academic support would be positively related to academic outcomes, and parental academic support would buffer the negative effects of discrimination on academic adjustment.

Data were drawn from the first wave of an ongoing longitudinal cohort study of 308 8th grade Latina/o students in 10 public schools in a Southwestern state. Students reported about peer- educator- and societal-perpetrated racial/ethnic discrimination, parental academic support, educational expectations, school engagement, and math/science efficacy. Average scores were calculated for measures with more than one item. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted in an SEM framework.

As shown in Table 1, discrimination indicators, for the most part, were not linked to adolescents’ academics; the only exception was that higher educator-perpetrated discrimination was linked to lower math/science efficacy. As expected, parental encouragement to go to college and parental talk about high school/college both positively contributed to all outcomes. Moderation analyses showed that for students with parents who commonly talked about high school/college, higher levels of societal discrimination were associated with higher math/science efficacy. In contrast, when students’ parents did not commonly talk about high school/college, students’ math/science efficacy was not influenced by societal discrimination (Figure 1a). For students whose parents highly encouraged college, higher levels of societal discrimination were related to poorer school engagement, but for those whose parents provided little encouragement about college attendance, societal discrimination was unrelated to engagement (Figure 1b). A different pattern emerged for peer-perpetrated discrimination. For students whose parents highly encouraged college, peer-perpetrated discrimination was unrelated to engagement, whereas for students whose parents provided less encouragement about college, higher levels of peer-perpetrated discrimination were linked to poorer engagement (Figure 1c).

These results suggest that parental talk and parental encouragement are independently positive contributors to Latina/o adolescents’ academics. Furthermore, parental talk is particularly positive for math/science efficacy in face of societal discrimination; however, the effects of parental encouragements about college are complex, and higher levels of encouragement to attend college appear to not serve adolescents well in the context of discrimination. The findings can inform intervention programs that aim to offer practical information to parents regarding ways to provide beneficial academic support for Latina/o adolescents who experience discrimination.

Authors

• Farin Bakhtiari, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Aprile D. Benner, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shanting Chen, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author