Poster #176 - Predicting Preschool Enrollment in Mexican-American, Low-Income Families

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

Preschool enrollment has been found to positively impact later academic achievement, especially for children from low-income families (Yoshikawa et al., 2013; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). Socioeconomic circumstance, cultural orientation, maternal employment, and preschool quality are several factors that have been found to influence parents’ decision to enroll their child in preschool (Crosnoe et al., 2014; Coley et al., 2014). The goal of the current study is to examine the influence of cultural values and orientation, family and significant other social support, and neighborhood level child opportunity on preschool enrollment within a sample of Mexican-American, low-income children.
This study utilized data from Las Madres Nuevas Project, a longitudinal investigation following a sample of 322 low-income, Mexican-American mother-child dyads prenatally through 9 years of age. Multimodal data collection included structured interviews, census data, and parent report to assess constructs of interest. A single logistic model was estimated with Mplus to predict maternal report of preschool enrollment (or intent to enroll before Kindergarten) at 54-months from variables collected at the prenatal time point, controlling for mother’s work status, household income, and number of other biological children. The Child Opportunity Index (Acevedo-Garcia et al., 2014) was used to measure the relative child neighborhood opportunity across the Phoenix metropolitan area based on indicators of educational opportunity, health and environmental opportunity, and socioeconomic opportunity. Cultural scales used included the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans (Cuellar et al., 1995) and the Mexican American Cultural Values Scale (Knight et al., 2009). Critical support items, family and partner negativity, were modified from the social strain items on the Midlife in the United States survey (Ryff et al., 2012).
In this sample, 38% of mothers reported that they did not intend to enroll their child in Preschool before beginning Kindergarten. Results of the logistic model indicate that child opportunity, Anglo orientation, and family negativity were significant predictors of preschool enrollment. The odds of preschool enrollment were higher when children were born in an area that afforded greater child opportunity (477% higher odds), when their mothers endorsed greater Anglo orientation (127% higher odds), and when they perceived more family negativity (29% higher odds). Number of other biological children, maternal work status, household family income, partner negativity, total familism, and Mexican orientation did not significantly predict the likelihood of preschool enrollment.
The results from this preliminary analysis suggest that there are a number of influential early cultural, contextual, and community factors that help determine whether Mexican American children attend preschool. Yet, results also suggest that there is some specificity differentiating the salient factors that account for attendance from those related sociocultural factors that do not. Further explicating the nature of this complexity will be critical in identifying mechanisms to help low-income Hispanic children achieve academically, an important goal given that Hispanic children constitute the “majority minority” ethnic group of students in U.S. public schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). Subsequent analyses will extend these findings to address the impact of preschool attendance on early academic achievement within this high risk sample.

Authors

• Laura Winstone, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Keith Crnic, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Linda Luecken, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nancy Gonzales, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emily Ross, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author