The Role of School Belonging in the Association Between Acculturative Stress and School Functioning

• In Event: Examining Diversity in the School-Based Experiences of Latinx Families: Stressors, Support Processes, and Well-Being

Abstract

National census data show that Latinx youth underperform academically as compared to White youth (The Nation’s Report Card, 2019), suggesting they may not be receiving adequate educational supports. Such supports are essential for Latinx youth who experience elevated levels of sociocultural risk factors (García Coll et al., 1996), such as acculturative stress (i.e., psychological strain engendered while adapting to US mainstream culture; Berry, 2005), which have been linked to lower levels of school functioning (Schwartz et al., 2007). A risk and resilience framework posits that associations between risk and outcomes may be buffered by protective factors (Masten, 2014). Schools represent a context in which Latinx youth may encounter stress but also experience support (e.g. school belonging; Sánchez et al., 2005). As such, the current study investigated the school-based stress and belonging experiences of Latinx youth and had two goals: (a) to examine longitudinal links between domains of acculturative stress (i.e., English competency pressures and bicultural stress), and two indices of school functioning, namely, academic self-efficacy and GPA, and (b) to investigate whether school belonging buffered the effects of acculturative stress on school functioning.
Method. The current study utilized data from a longitudinal study of 288 Latinx 8th grade adolescents (MageT1 = 13.69 years, SD = .56; 47.70% female; 86.30% U.S.-born) from the Southwest. Adolescents completed telephone interviews and reported on demographic information including family’s highest education level, gender, and nativity, and responded to items on English competency pressures and bicultural stress, (7 items each; Rodriguez et al., 2015), academic self-efficacy (6 items; Arunkumar et al., 1999), school belonging (4 items; Maurizi et al., 2013), and GPA. See Table 1 for descriptives. Study goals were tested using structural equation modeling (Mplus v8); numerical integration was used for moderation tests.
Results/Discussion. To reduce multicollinearity, models were run separately for each acculturative stress domain (see Table 2). For goal 1, results indicated that bicultural stress and English competency pressures were negatively related to changes in academic self-efficacy but were not associated with changes in GPA. For goal 2, school belonging qualified links between bicultural stress and academic self-efficacy, and links between English language pressures and GPA. For bicultural stress, at high levels of school belonging, bicultural stress was negatively associated with academic self-efficacy (β = -0.28; SE = 0.11; p = .01); at low levels, the link was not significant (β = 0.16; SE = 0.10; p = .10). In contrast, for English competency pressures, probing showed that at low levels of school belonging, English competency pressures were positively associated with GPA (β = 0.42; SE = 0.22; p = .05), but links were not significant at high levels of school belonging (β = -0.66; SE = 0.36; p = .06). The findings suggest that the moderating role of school belonging may be nuanced and differ depending on the type of stressor under consideration. The discussion will focus on the heterogeneity found in the school-based risk and protective experiences of Latinx youth.

Authors

• Rayni Thomas, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author

• Melissa Y Delgado, University of Arizona
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rajni L. Nair, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kiera Midori Coulter, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author