Parent and Child Acculturative Stress Profiles among low Income Latinx Families

• In Event: Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: PS 14 Topic - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Abstract

Background: Acculturation is the process of adapting one’s existing culture to a new surrounding culture (Berry, 1987). Common among immigrant families, theory suggests that acculturation rates differ among parents and children and these acculturation gaps are associated with poorer family functioning (e.g., Nair et al., 2018). However, very few studies have examined acculturative stress (AS), the reduction in health status due to challenges directly stemming from the acculturation process (Berry et al., 1987), in a dyadic way. AS can result from experiences of conflicting cultural values, language difficulties, and discrimination and is predictive of negative youth outcomes in both the mental health and academic domain (Sirin et al., 2013; Albeg & Castro-Olivo, 2014). Since very few studies simultaneously examine parent and child reports of AS when studying youth outcomes, little is known about how the makeup of parent-child dyads predicts AS. The current study utilizes a person-centered analytic technique to empirically derive profile groupings from parent and child AS reports.
Method: Participants include 259 Latinx middle school students (Mage(SD) = 11.5(.96) years; 56.4% female) and their parents. Dyads completed their respective version of the Acculturative Stress Measure (9 items; Vega, Gil, Warheit, & Apospori, 1993), which taps into cultural and language conflicts, and perceived discrimination (e.g., “How often has it been hard to get along with others because you don’t speak English well?”). A latent profile analysis (LPA) was conducted with 12 indicators (6 for child and 6 for parent). Analyses will be conducted to examine which demographic factors vary across profile membership.
Results: Model fit indices from the LPA analyses (see Table 1) indicated that a 4-profile solution best fit the data. Four distinct groups were identified (Figure 1). Two in which parent and child acculturative stress (AS) levels matched and two in which they did not. One group included 29 (11.2%) high child-low parent acculturative stress (HLAS) dyads. A second group included 36 (13.9%) low child-high parent acculturative stress (LHAS) dyads. A third group was made up of 38 (14.7%) dyads with matching and moderate acculturative stress (MMAS). The final and largest group consisted of 156 (60.2%) dyads in which both children and parents reported low levels of acculturative stress (LLAS). Preliminary analyses of demographic predictors indicate that the proportion of dyads across profiles did not vary by child gender, X2 (3, 259) = 1.321, ns. Further analyses will examine parent and child nativity, parent education level, and parent and child language proficiency level as predictors of profile membership in this 4-profile model. Implications of this research are to identify dyads that are experiencing higher levels of AS which may make students more vulnerable to negative outcomes. Future research should focus on the mental health and academic achievement of dyads across these distinct profile groups.

Authors

• Laura Saldana, DePaul University
  Presenting Author

• Antonio J Polo, DePaul University
  Non-Presenting Author