Poster #171 - The Impact of Family-Academic Conflict and President Trump on Latina/o First-Generation College Students’ Attentional Control

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

An understudied barrier to Latina/o college success is cultural conflict between family obligation and academic obligation. Previous qualitative and survey research reveals that these conflicts are common in the lives Latina/o first-generation college students, especially those living close to home, and disrupt attentional resources important for academics (Authors, 2015; resubmitted). The purpose of our research was to provide experimental evidence of this effect. H1a: Latina/o first-generation college students, exposed to a home-school conflict prompt, will perform significantly worse on an attentional control task, compared with participants reflecting on family obligation, academic obligation, or an irrelevant control activity. H1b: We predicted this effect would be greater among Latina/o students living in closer proximity to their parents’ homes.
Though not intentional, our study was conducted in the midst of a historic political event: the election and inauguration of President Donald Trump. This is important as President Trump has taken several measures to deport undocumented Latina/o immigrants. Although we did not know the documentation status of our participations, almost all had immigrant parents. Thus, many participant families may have been at risk of deportation. H2: We hypothesized that being prompted to reflect on family obligation would increase attentional disruption for students participating in the experiment after, compared with before the election and inauguration. We did not expect any differences pre- and post-Trump for the other conditions because we reasoned being prompted to reflect on family obligations would make family situations more salient, such as concern about the possibility of family deportations.
One-hundred-and-sixty-one Latina/o first-generation college students at UCLA participated in our study. During an in-person session, participants responded in writing to one of four prompts (Tables 1 & 2), and thereafter, engaged in an attentional control task on a laptop computer. Attentional control served as our dependent measure and was defined as the percentage of errors that participants made on a Stroop task. Block randomization was used to randomly assign participants to the experimental conditions.
Though H1a was not supported, H1b and H3 were. Results revealed a significant interaction between distance and condition, F(1, 145) = 2.93, p = .036. Two separate one-way ANOVAs revealed that the effect of condition was significant for students living close to their parent’s home, F(3, 79) = 3.20, p = .028, but not those living far. Planned contrasts revealed that for students living close to home (less than 50 miles away), home-school conflict produced more attentional disruption than the academic and control conditions (p = .013 and .022, respectively). Results also revealed a significant pre- and post-Trump difference whereby students in the family obligation condition exhibited significantly more attentional disruption if they participated in our study after the presidential election and inauguration than before, t(39) = 1.82, p = .038. There were no pre- and post-Trump differences in the other conditions.
Our results reaffirm the need to create interventions that aid Latina/o first-generation college students in harmonizing their home and school cultures and negotiating their fears, now that Donald Trump is President.

Authors

• Yolanda Vasquez-Salgado, California State University, Northridge
  Presenting Author

• Patricia Greenfield, Children's Digital Media Center@LA
  Non-Presenting Author