Immigrant adolescents’ roots and dreams: Perceived mismatches between ethnic identities and aspirational selves predict engagement

ABSTRACT

Immigrant adolescents are generally more ambitious but not as likely to achieve their career/occupational aspirations as their peers. The present study draws on self-discrepancy and social identity literatures to define and explore the role of mismatches between ethnic and aspiration-related ideal selves. In two samples recruited in Canada, 73% of immigrant adolescents aspired to a university-bound career (e.g., physician, engineer). As expected, adolescents reporting larger ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies were less engaged towards their aspiration (Sample 1, n = 73) and viewed school less favorably (Sample 2, n = 125). The present analyses suggest that actual/ideal self-discrepancies mediate these associations, thus extending prior findings and highlighting the role of self-discrepancies in immigrant adolescents’ experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-discrepancies
• ethnic identity
• immigration
• adolescence
• aspiration

Acknowledgments

The authors are deeply indebted to the team from the Table de Concertation Jeunesse de Côte-des-Neiges: Vincent-Thomas Hamelin, Mélissa Racine LeBreton, Odile Laforest, and especially Patrice S. César, without whom the community partnership that made this research possible could have never been built. The authors also wish to acknowledge that the present work was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec Société et Culture and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Finally, the authors wish to express their gratitude towards the participants, who deeply engaged with the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For clarity and simplicity, we will use the expression “immigrant adolescents” to describe first and second-generation immigrants in the present paper. However, we want to recognize that many of these adolescents are citizens of the countries they were born in or that they moved to and, yet, they are generally referred to as immigrants. Many of these adolescents were born in Canada, and are commonly referred to as immigrants as well. This term allows acknowledging the history of migration of their family, but can paradoxically place them in a situation where their experiences and voices as individuals born in Canada, with full citizenship and rights, are not fully acknowledged. Moreover, in the present paper, we will refer to students who belong to ethnic or racial groups that are not dominant in the society they live in as members of “ethnic minority” groups or communities.

We will use “ethnic minority identity” to refer to the group that adolescents associate with their origins and in which they recognize themselves the most. Participants named national groups when asked to describe their origins in this context.

2. The original Study 2 sample included 153 participants. However, this sample included 28 participants who completed the survey in English. Taking a more conservative approach, we reported only the results of participants who completed the survey in French in the result section. However, because this represents a large number of participants to exclude from the sample, we deemed important to provide readers with the results that include participants who completed the survey in French and in English.

When including the 153 adolescents, actual/ideal self-discrepancies were significantly predicted by ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies (β = .25, p = .002, η² = .06, 95% C.I. [.10, .41]), F(1, 151) = 10.16, p = .002. Computing total effects revealed that, on their own, ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies also significantly and negatively associated with attitudes towards school for immigrant adolescents (β = -.16, p = .048, η² = .03, 95% C.I. [-.32, -.002]), F(1, 151) = 3.99, p = .048. In a regression taking into account actual/ideal self-discrepancies (F(2, 150) = 12.25, p < .001, η² = .14), which were a significant predictor of attitudes towards school (β = -.35, p < .001, η² = .13, 95% C.I. [-.51, -.20]), the association between ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies and attitudes towards school became non-significant (β = -.07, p = .354, η² = .01, [-.23, .08]). A bootstrapping procedure with 5,000 samples generated a standardized mean estimate of -.09 (S.E. = .04) with a 95% bias-corrected confidence interval excluding zero [-.18, -.03]. These results suggest that actual/ideal self-discrepancies mediate the relation between ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies and attitudes towards school. Thus, consistent with our hypotheses, immigrant adolescents who perceive large ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies also tend to perceive large actual/ideal self-discrepancies, and perceiving large actual/ideal self-discrepancies is in turn associated with attitudes towards school.

3. The actual/ideal self-discrepancies kurtosis and skewness indexes were higher than is the case for normal distributions for the first sample. For this reason, we conducted an additional set of analyses after a logarithmic transformation was performed on actual/ideal self-discrepancies. After the logarithmic transformation, the resulting actual/ideal self-discrepancies variable had a skewness of .71 and a kurtosis of 1.19. As expected, ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies predict actual/ideal self-discrepancies (b = .06, β = .31, p = .008, η² = .10, 95% C.I. of b estimate [.02, .11]), F(1, 71) = 7.57, p = .008, η² = .10. Also, the total effect model suggested that, on their own, ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies predict aspiration engagement for immigrant adolescents (b = -.18, β = -.25, p = .037, η² = .06, 95% C.I. of b estimate [-.35, -.01]), F(1, 71) = 4.52, p = .037, η² = .06. Aspiration engagement was no longer predicted by ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies (b = -.11, β = -.15, p = .200, η² = .02, 95% C.I. of b estimate [-.29, .06]) when actual/ideal self-discrepancies were taken into consideration (b = −1.11, β = -.30, p = .011, η² = .09, 95% C.I. of b estimate [−1.96, -.26]), F(2, 70) = 5.82, p = .005, η² = .14. A bootstrapping procedure with 5,000 samples generated a mean estimate for the unstandardized indirect association of ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies with aspiration engagement of .07 (S.E. = .05) with a 95% bias-corrected confidence interval excluding zero [-.22 to -.01] (standardized indirect association: -.09 (S.E. = .07), 95% C.I. [-.28 to -.01]), thus further supporting the mediating role of actual/ideal self-discrepancies. Since these analyses yielded very similar results to the ones found without the logarithmic transformation, we reported the results without the logarithmic transformation in the result section to facilitate interpretation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Fonds de recherche du Québec Société et Culture master’s fellowship (131913), as well as by a Vanier doctoral fellowship and a postdoctoral fellowship awarded to the first author by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (number 770-2011-0018 and 756-2016-0572);Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture [131913];Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [756-2016-0572,770-2011-0018];