Testing advocacy communication theory among undocumented college students using latent profile analysis

ABSTRACT

Undocumented college students face systemic oppression, which they challenge through advocacy. Often, research focuses on one type of advocacy, but Advocacy Communication Theory (ACT) conceptualizes advocacy as multidimensional – minoritized people can engage in communicative strategies at the interpersonal, mediated, community, organizational, and policy levels to challenge oppression. Here, we used three waves of longitudinal survey data from 366 undocumented students, primarily of Latine origin, and conducted latent profile analyses. We found four advocacy communication profiles: Infrequent, Interpersonal, Organizational, and Frequent Advocators. The more students observed their family engage in undocumented advocacy, and the more students saw negative media depictions of undocumented immigrants, the more likely students were to be frequent advocators than infrequent advocators. Our findings support ACT's propositions.

KEYWORDS:

• Undocumented immigration
• advocacy
• socialization
• latent profile analysis

Acknowledgements

We extend our deepest gratitude to our participants. We also thank everyone who distributed and posted our information flyer and helped us recruit students.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Cornejo and Kam (R&R) define advocacy communication as an expressive process with varying degrees of risk, visibility, costs, and benefits, which includes (non)conscious, (im)explicit, and (non)verbal messages, performed at various levels (i.e., interpersonal, mediated, community, institutional), and that can be formally organized or informally executed to challenge negative attitudes, actions, practices, or policies against a minoritized group.

2 Reporting alphas and omegas is unnecessary when utilizing mixture models (e.g., LPA). Nevertheless, we report them in this manuscript in case others wish to use the measures for future studies and other types of analyses.

Additional information

Funding

Dr. Cornejo is supported by the NIH FIRST award number U54CA267738, with funding support from Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health (OD).