School adjustment of ethnic minority youth: a qualitative and quantitative research synthesis of family-related risk and resource factors

ABSTRACT

In today’s multicultural societies, the question of how school adjustment (adapting to the role of being a student) can be promoted for students from ethnic minority backgrounds is of high importance. The ecological approach to acculturation research proposes minority students’ school adjustment is shaped by the surrounding context, and it suggests that the microsystem family plays an important role. Specifically, parents’ acculturation, practices, attitudes, and background have been identified as key factors. While there exist systematic reviews of the impact of parental factors more broadly, some of which researched ethnic minorities, a comprehensive literature review of family-related factors that affect ethnic minority youth’s school adjustment is missing. The present study provides a synthesis of qualitative and quantitative empirical research of interest, including 60 qualitative and 46 quantitative studies. Its content analysis portrays in what ways parental acculturation, practices, attitudes and background can support or hamper school adjustment among ethnic minority youth. A subsequent meta-analysis quantifies the strength of the impact of these parental variables on the school adjustment of their children. Our findings show that parental practices have the most crucial impact on the psychological well-being, academic self-esteem and aspirations, behaviour and achievement outcomes of minority youth.

KEYWORDS:

• School adjustment
• minority youth
• acculturation
• family
• resource factors
• risk factors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this article, we use the terms “ethnic minority youth/students” or “minority youth/students” to refer to students of different – sometimes interlinked – origins who are culturally different from the majority (i.e. immigrants of all generations, other ethnic and racial minorities, indigenous and colonised groups).

2. For articles published between 2000 and 2013 the search terms were: “acculturation” AND “adjustment” AND “school”, “acculturation” AND “academic achievement” AND “school”, “acculturation” AND “teacher–student relationship”, “acculturation” AND “student–student relationship”, “acculturation” AND “teacher attitudes” AND “acculturation” AND “teaching” AND “school”. For the articles published between 2013 and 2019 we used “acculturation” AND “students” AND “relationships” instead of “acculturation” AND “student-student relationship” as we did not get any hit for the latter search combination.

3. One article reported on mixed-methods research and is therefore counted in both categories.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under Grant number P300P1_147810.