Recipient Organization
UNIV OF MINNESOTA
(N/A)
ST PAUL,MN 55108
Performing Department
Family Social Science
Non Technical Summary
Children of immigrants are one of the fastest growing populations in the United States (Grieco et al., 2012; Karoly & Gonzales, 2011). One in five children in K-12 education is an immigrant or a child of immigrants (Goodwin, 2017), and nearly one in four children lives in households with at least one foreign-born parent (Grieco et al., 2012; Karoly & Gonzales, 2011). However, many of children of immigrants are more likely to live in low-income households with low parent education (Proctor et al., 2016) in highly concentrated areas with other immigrant populations. Research shows that low-income and lower levels of parent education tend to influence a wide range of developmental outcomes for children, including academic underachievement (Pang, Han, & Pang, 2011). Although parental income and education have predicted children's achievement in general, these variables do not usually account for most children of immigrants' academic achievement. Evidence in the past showed that despite coming from poor family environments and growing up with uneducated parents, some immigrant children performed significantly well when compared to other immigrant and nonimmigrant students (McNall, Dunnigan, & Mortimer, 1994; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). Specifically, research suggests several explanatory factors that account for why children tend to outperform other students despite their family conditions. These factors included grit or perseverance, self-discipline, family obligations, where children want to repay their parents' sacrifices, attachment to cultural identity and traditions, parent support and communication about the importance of education, and peer influence (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Hutchinson, 1997; Rumbaut & Ima, 1988; Xiong et al., 2006; Zhou & Bankston, 1998).Although the literature on immigrant families and education has been well-established, most of the studies tend to focus on students' perspectives (Lee, 2005; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Xiong & Huang, 2011), parents of low-income backgrounds, especially first-generation (Rumbaut, 2004), and unrelated families, or compare family members across families (Collignon, Men, & Tan, 2001; Lee & Green, 2008; Xiong et al., 2006; Yang, 2008). Few studies have examined academically high-achieving families from the perspectives of multiple family members across two or more generations. An academically high-achieving family refers to a family that has multiple family members, sometimes from multiple generations, who have attained a college education. Family refers to a group of individuals related by birth, marriage, or adoption (Cohen, 2018). Understanding these high-achieving family characteristics, routines and rituals, motivation, and social capital is critical to the ongoing effort to close the achievement gap between children of immigrant families, especially Southeast Asian families, and native-born children (Good, Masewicz, & Vogel, 2010; Pang, Han, & Pang, 2011).Southeast Asians, including Cambodian, Hmong, Lao, and Vietnamese, were political refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as a result of the Indochinese war (Rumbaut, 1997). Today, there are 2.5 million Southeast Asians living in the United States (Asian Pacific American Legal Center & Asian American Justice Center, 2011). Vietnamese is the largest Southeast Asian group with 1,737,433 million people, follows by Cambodian (276,667) and Hmong (260,073). Contrary to the national population, in Minnesota the Hmong are the largest Southeast Asian population (66,181), follows by Vietnamese (27,086) and Lao (12,009).Together, there are 114,819 Southeast Asians living in Minnesota and most Southeast Asians reside in the seven county metro area that includes the Twin Cities (Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans, 2012).As a refugee group, Southeast Asians tend to face more barriers compared to the other Asian Amerian groups (Um, 2003). On average, Southeast Asians have lower levels of educational attainment and higher proportion of the population living below the federal poverty line compared to other Asian American groups (Takei & Sakamoto, 2011). For example, a study conducted by the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans (2012) found that Hmong, Cambodian, and Lao children were falling behind other Asian American students on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment, a state standardized test used to assess children's levels of proficiency in reading, math, and science (Minnesota Department of Education, n.d.). Specifically, only 47% Hmong students were considered proficient on the MCA II reading test compared to 73% students and 83% Chinese students. Similarly, only 40% of the Cambodian and Lao students were considered proficient on the MCA II math test compared to 64% Vietnamese students and 83% Chinese students. Based on the extant literature and school data, this study will focus only on Cambodian, Hmong, and Lao families.THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK To explore the life histories, characteristics, family dynamics, and social capital of academically high-achieving families in the Southeast Asian families, Coleman's (1988) social capital theory was chosen to guide the proposed study given the thick networks of Southeast Asian families (Eng, Szmodis, & Mulsow, 2014; Tingvold, Middelthon, & Hauff, 2012; Xiong et al., 2006). According to Coleman (1990), social capital is conceptualized as "the set of resources that inhere in family relations and in community social organizations and that are useful for the cognitive or social development of a child or a young person'' (p. 300). As a theoretical framework, it assumes that the relationships in the network, once established, can serve as resources that individuals can use for a variety of purposes, both economic and noneconomic. Thus, Coleman argues that individuals who live in thick and close-knit social networks, such as those surrounding Southeast Asian families, are more likely to generate and accumulate social capital; the more social capital an individual accumulates, the better the chance that an individual will succeed (Coleman, 1988, 1990). Portes and Rumbaut (2001) conducted a longitudinal study that included Southeast Asian American parents and adolescents and found that despite low parent education and limited economic resources, Southeast Asian American children tend to adapt better when they live in a supportive co-ethnic community. Similarly, Crozier and Davies (2006) found that older cousins in particular often stepped in to help translate and attend events for parents who do not speak the language. Pallock and Lamborn (2006) conducted a study with 104 African American and 60 European American high school students to examine the influence of extended kinship support on adolescents' academic adjustment and found a significant correlation between adolescents' perceptions of extended kinship support and academic adjustment.Based on known factors that account for children's achievement in the literature and assumptions of Social Capital Theory (Coleman, 1988), the proposed qualitative study will explore the following research questions:What do we know about academically high-achieving families compared to academically underachieving families, including their life history, family routines, family rituals, family communications, family relationships, and family social networks?What are the characteristics of social networks of academically high-achieving families and academically underachieving families and what roles do these social networks play in the overall children's academic achievement?
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
The aim of the proposed study is to explore the life histories, family characteristics, family dynamics, and social capital of academically high-achieving families, especially among Southeast Asian (Hmong, Cambodian, and Lao) immigrant families.
Project Methods
MethodologyTo explore academically high-achieving family members' accounts of their life stories, family dynamics, and social networks, it is important to listen to each family member's story. As such, two methodologies will be used to guide the interview questions and analysis procedure. First, a life history method (Goodson, 2009; Gramling & Carr, 2004) was chosen to guide the interview and analysis of the proposed study because it can collect rich, in-depth data from a chronological perspective to capture family stories, experiences, and life events from multiple family members. Next, the social networks methodology will be used to probe for specific ties various family members have with others outside of the nuclear family. Given the thick networks of Southeast Asian families (Eng, Szmodis, & Mulsow, 2014; Tingvold, Middelthon, & Hauff, 2012; Xiong et al., 2006), we want to focus on the networks of each family member that have played a critical role in his or her achievement.Recruiting procedureGiven the difficulty of recruiting immigrant families to participate in social science studies (Fletcher & Hunter, 2003; Thao, 2003), this project will employ Boyer et al.'s (2013) friendship-based social network recruitment strategy (FSNRS). FSNRS was part of the social networks method introduced by Rothenberg et al. (2000) and implemented by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2005) to identify persons at risk for HIV infection and those who are at increased risk for HIV. Boyer et al.'s (2013) study found the FSNRS approach to be feasible and acceptable to recruiting at-risk young women for HIV screening. Since Southeast Asian families are part of a close-knit community and are highly related to one another, FSNRS was chosen to identify and screen for academically low and high achieving families. Based on what is known about the social structure of each Southeast Asian community (Tingvold et al., 2012; Xiong et al., 2006), different advisory groups will be engaged to help identify eligible families. For example, in the Hmong community, we will recruit a small group of clan leaders to collaborate with us to identify eligible families to be screened for the study. In the Lao and Cambodian communities, we will work with leaders of the Lao Assistance Center of Minnesota and United Cambodian Association of Minnesota to identify community leaders to collaborate.Sample To be eligible to participate in the study, every child in the family must be enrolled in college at the time of the study or have already graduated from college. We called this family the academically high-achieving family. The proposed study intends to recruit 10 academically high achieving families from each of the three Southeast Asian groups (Hmong, Cambodian, and Lao) to be interviewed. In order to make sense of the results of the academically high achieving families, we will also recruit 15 (five families per ethnic group) families that do not have anyone in college at the time of the study or have anyone who has already attained a college education. Although 45 families comprise a small sample, other researchers have suggested a range between five and twenty-five interviews to be saturated (Creswell, 1998).InterviewsAll interviews will be conducted in person (ideally, via face-to-face depending on the COVID-19 circumstance) and in a place that is convenient to the participants. Since our goal is to capture each family member's life history and social networks, all interviews will be conducted with each family member separately. Given the budget constraints, however, all interviews will be conducted in English, except for those whose have limited English to participate in the interview. Thus, whenever participants request for a non-English interview, every attempt will be made to contract trained interviewers in the community to conduct the interview. All interviews will be audio-recorded and will last between one hour to two hours. In order to draft a comprehensive list of questions, a focus group of Southeast Asian college students and/or individuals in the community will be recruited to explore the types of questions to be included in the study. For example, we may want focus group participants to think about questions like why do you think everyone in your family is a college graduate? Why is your story? What motivates you to go to college? Who influences your decision and how? Who helps you (or have been important sources of school-related information to you) along the way? As such, a list of interview questions will be drafted in a later date and provide for focus group participants to help to co-create.AnalysisThree analysis approaches will be used to analyze the interviews simultaneously. First, lifeline, as life history methodology, will be employed to analyze and depict each family life's story/narrative, which includes significant family events, important markers, and social networks in a chronological order visually (Gramling & Carr, 2004). Next, grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), especially the open and axial coding procedures, will be used to code life history narratives to address the first research question and the first part of the second research question. Life history of each individual within and across families will be used to create themes, subthemes, and relationships of the themes to compare and contrast with the life histories of families who do not have anyone in the family in college and/or graduated from college (or the academically low-achieving families). Lastly, social networks analysis will be used to answer the second part of research question 2. Specifically, each family member's interview will be coded based on time of the relationship, the nature of the relationship, role of the network in the family member's educational success, and information received from the network or ties. Specifically, we want to understand participants' ties to certain individuals during their life and the role these ties play in the family member's educational journey. This type of in-depth family analysis is rarely done in the literature, including the principal investigator's previous work with Southeast Asian families (Mao, Deenanath, & Xiong, 2012; Xiong, Deenanath, & Mao, 2013; Xiong & Huang, 2011).