Acculturative Stress, School Belonging, and Academic Well-being Among Latino Youth: A Prospective Study

• In Event: 3-068 - The Pervasiveness of Stress and Adversity in the Lives of Today's U.S. Latino/a Adolescents

Integrative Statement

Ethnic minority status is linked to unique psychosocial stressors that impact adolescents’ adjustment (Garcia Coll et al., 1996). Acculturative stress occurs when individuals experience strains from the cultural adaptation process such as learning a new language (Williams & Berry, 1991). While extant work highlights the deleterious impact of discrimination on Latino youth’s academic outcomes (Uma ña-Taylor, 2016), less is known about the role of acculturative stress. As such, the first goal of this paper was to investigate how two domains of acculturative stress - bicultural stressors and English pressures - contributed to changes in academic well-being for Latino youth across a one-year period in middle school. Risk and resilience perspectives underscore the importance of protective factors that may serve as buffers for youth (Masten & Powell, 2003). The extent to which youth feel included and supported at school (e.g. “school belonging”) may be an important factor in the academic well-being of ethnic minority students (Steele, 1992). Thus, our second goal was to examine whether school belonging would function as a protective factor in relations between domains of acculturative stress and changes in Latino youth’s academic well-being.

Methods. Participants were 329 (54% female, 86% US born) Latino adolescents and their parents, interviewed when adolescents were in 8th grade (Mage = 13.69 years, SD = .56; T1) and 1 year later (Mage = 14.69 years, SD = .46; T2). Adolescents reported on their gender (0 = female, 1 = male; T1), nativity (0 = foreign born, 1 = US born; T1), parent education (T1), bicultural stressors (T1), English competency pressures (T1), school belonging (T1), academic math/science identity (T1 & T2), and grades (T1 & T2). To address study goals, we used structural equation models estimated in Mplus 7.3 and using FIML-R to account for missing data.

Results. With regard to goal 1, higher levels of adolescents’ bicultural stress at T1 related to decreases in adolescents’ academic science identity, science commitment, educational expectations one year later (T2). English pressures were related to increases in educational expectations, academic science identity, and science commitment. With respect to goal 2, effects of stressors were conditional on school belonging. For example, bicultural stress (T1) was more strongly associated with declines in youth’s grades (T1 to T2) when youth reported higher levels of school belonging (T1) (Table 1; Figure 1).

Discussion. Differences in relationships across domains of acculturative stress provide support for the contention that researchers would be well served to disaggregate global measures of stressors into domain specific categories and investigate the unique and joint contributions of these domains to particular outcomes (McMahon et. al., 2003). While our findings indicated that school belonging was a moderator of relations between bicultural stress and academic well-being indices, effects were contrary to hypothesis. Our findings highlight that acculturative stressors demonstrate contextual relevance; the contexts in which youth reside provide them not only with supportive relationships but also with a unique filter through which they experience and then respond to acculturative stress (White, Nair & Bradley, 2017).

Authors

• Rajni L Nair, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

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

• Lorey A Wheeler, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
  Non-Presenting Author