In Thoughts, Words, and Deeds: Are Social Class Differences in Parental Support Similar across Immigrant and Native Families?

ABSTRACT

Much of the literature examining social class differences in parental involvement has drawn on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction, but the applicability of this model to immigrant families is unclear. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, a nationally representative study of high school students who were sophomores in 2002 (n = 11,430), we examine whether patterns of social class differences, as measured by maternal education, in parental support among immigrant parents are similar to those found among native-born parents. Results from multivariate regression analyses show that social class differences among immigrant parents differ in magnitude and in some cases, direction, compared to those of native-born parents. We argue that these findings suggest a cross-class “immigrant habitus” that shapes parental support both in schools and at home.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• immigration
• parental support
• social class

Acknowledgments

Phoebe Ho acknowledges support from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant #R305B090015 to the University of Pennsylvania. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the U.S. Department of Education.

Notes

1. All reported sample sizes are rounded to the nearest tens digit in accordance with National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data disclosure rules.

2. About 19 percent of the full sample was missing on both measures of parental nativity and about 6 percent was missing race/ethnicity.

3. Dealing with missing data using multiple imputation methods corrects for standard errors that are typically too small when using single imputation techniques such as conditional or sample mean imputation. The multiple imputation technique first formulates an imputation model and creates a series of imputed data sets, applies the imputation model to each data set, and creates a single set of estimates that are pooled from estimates from each imputed data set. For our analyses, we created 30 imputed data sets. Appendix Table A1 notes the percent missing on all imputed variables.

4. The response categories for whether the parent participates in school fund-raising activities or does volunteer work such as supervising lunch or chaperoning a field trip are none, once or twice, three or four times, and more than four times. The response categories for the other activities are either yes or no.

5. The response categories for whether the parent contacted the school about school programs, child’s plans after leaving high school, and participating in school activities or volunteer work are none, once or twice, three or four times, and more than four times.

6. Swartz (1997) has criticized Bourdieu’s failure to distinguish between aspirations and expectations. In a secondary analysis, we examine socioeconomic differences in parental aspirations, which are measured by a survey question that asks parents how far they want their children to go in school. Our findings for parental aspirations closely mirror patterns for parental expectations, suggesting that for parents the two concepts operate in a similar fashion.

7. Supplementary analyses using the composite SES measure, created by NCES, divide the sample into thirds based on the average socioeconomic status across the entire sample to approximate working, middle, and upper class. In other supplementary analyses, we use paternal education (whether or not fathers attained a bachelor’s degree) as the measure of social class in a similar fashion to our main analyses.

8. In a robustness check, we also included a dummy variable for the nativity of fathers. The main results of the analyses did not change and the variable itself was not significant in any model.

9. In Table 6, Model 3, the magnitude of the coefficient for whether the mother has a bachelor’s degree or higher is 0.30, while the coefficients for the interaction terms for foreign-born Asian and Latino mothers and whether the mother has a bachelor’s degree or higher is −0.41 and −0.71, respectively. A test of simple slopes also indicates that less educated foreign-born Asian and Latino mothers, but not foreign-born white mothers, have higher expectations than their more-educated same-race/coethnic counterparts at the p < 0.05 level.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng

Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng is an Assistant Professor of International Education at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. His interests include comparative perspectives on race/ethnicity (with a focus on the U.S. and China), immigrant adaptation, and social capital within the school and educational context.

Phoebe Ho

Phoebe Ho is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the adaptation and integration of immigrant families, particularly the relationship between family processes and educational outcomes among the children of immigrants.