Poster #46 - Do conversations with parents about school and the future influence Latinx adolescents’ academic aspirations and expectations?

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

College education is a feasible way for students, especially minority and first-generation college students, to improve their socioeconomic status and social class (Hout, 2012). The desire to attain higher education (i.e., educational aspiration) and the expectation of getting a higher education (i.e., educational expectation) have an essential impact on students’ achievement and choices in high school and college (Wigfield et al., 2016). Understanding what social factors support students’ aspirations and expectations towards college enables us to access and support students’ educational attainment (Abu-Hilal, 2000). According to Bronfenbrenner’s (2006) bioecological theory, students’ education aspirations and expectations are formed in the process of interacting with socializers such as parents at home. Therefore, the first goal of this study is to examine the extent to which the parent socialization process, such as conversations with parents about the future and school, is related to Latinx adolescents’ educational aspirations and expectations in the same year. For the second goal, using the individual fixed effect model, we examined whether within-individual having more conversations with parents would increase Latinx adolescents’ educational aspirations and expectations. This paper specifically focused on Latino adolescents to address the achievement gap between Latino adolescents and other ethnic groups and ultimately support the representation of Latinx students in higher education (Leavitt & Hess, 2019).
The current study uses a longitudinal dataset of 104 Latino adolescents in a large southern metropolitan city (57% female, 90% Mexican-origin, 86% U.S. born, Mage=14). Students’ educational aspirations and expectations were measured each year from 9th to 11th. Parent conversation about the future is students’ perceptions about the frequency of parent-child conversation about the future that is measured with a 9-item scale that assesses the extent to which they believe how often they talked with their parents about school and future related topics (α = .85).
As shown in Table 1, the pooled OLS analysis results showed that overall parent conversations about school and the future significantly related to Latinx adolescents’ educational aspirations and expectations, controlling for parent highest education, gender, parent income, and school fixed effect. As shown in Table 2, individual fixed-effect results showed that parent conversations significantly predict within-individual educational aspirations and expectations. After accounting for the individual differences, the adolescents would have higher educational aspirations and expectations the year parents had more conversations with the Latinx adolescents.
Even though parent conversations about school and the future did not always predict students’ educational aspirations and expectations cross-sectionally, using an individual fixed-effect across time, we found that within-individual students had higher educational aspirations and expectations when parents had more conversations with them about school and the future. Our study supported prior literature and shed light on the importance of parental socialization in supporting Latinx adolescents’ educational aspirations and expectations. We also provided evidence for programs or practitioners targeting the underrepresentation of Latinx students in higher education to focus on the parent socialization process to have more conversations with adolescents about school and the future.

Authors

• Yuxuan Hou

• Xinyu Zhang
  Presenting Author

• Zirui Wang