Investigating Latinx Caregiver Preparation for Immigration Socialization in Mixed-Status Families

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Carola Suarez-Orozco at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the immigration socialization practices of mixed-status immigrant families in the U.S. While 7 percent of U.S. children live with an unauthorized immigrant parent, researchers and practitioners alike have little insight into how these children and their families process the phenomenon of “illegality.” Existing research highlights the role of external messages in the family’s communication practices, like school and media messages.

The literature on ethnic-racial socialization suggests caregiver approaches to communicating with their children about how to cope with such messages can play an inhibiting or protective role in youths’ development. Family separation and other immigration-related threats may complicate caregivers’ ability to provide a safe and developmentally appropriate avenue for meaning-making, which can affect children’s learning in school via a low sense of belonging, self-concept, or safety, however.

The focus of the proposed study is to unpack family-level socialization processes, referred to as immigration socialization, to better understand the familial mechanisms involved in the association between immigration status and child development. Ultimately, providing caregiver support related to discussing topics of immigration and legal status in a developmentally appropriate way is needed.

Family-level socialization processes about race and ethnicity matter for immigrant and non-immigrant children alike because a strong sense of belonging in society, communities, school, and the home predicts success in academic achievement and health outcomes. For parents, navigating immigration policy may be cognitively challenging and further complicated by the responsibility to protect and educate their children.

To understand the ways current U.S. sociopolitical forces related to immigration policy affect the mechanism of self-concept as an outcome in children and adults, basic research is needed to understand how immigration-related rhetoric shapes children’s learning through caregiver/parental processes as well as how to intervene to support these children.

The goal of this project is to begin establishing this foundational knowledge around immigration socialization related to the legal concept of undocumented status. This research study project consists of a two-phase mixed-methods approach from the lens of caregivers/parents in mixed-status immigrant families and focuses on these adults’ process of immigration socialization preparation.

Phase 1 will consist of semi-structured interviews with caregivers in Latinx mixed-status families. Those qualitative findings will consequently be used to adapt an existing knowledge-building and interactive ERS workshop series using stepwise learning, attention to affective concerns of caregivers, and providing vicarious social models with verbal encouragement In Phase 2, the adapted content will be implemented, and a set of measures will be gathered to capture caregiver/parent skills, motivation, confidence, and immigration-threat to test the efficacy of structured preparation for the delivery of an intervention providing immigration socialization messages for Latinx mixed-status immigrant families.

Findings will advance scientific knowledge on immigration-specific family socialization and study the potential moderating role of caregiver-child immigration socialization preparation on parental and caregiver outcomes.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.