Immigrant Adolescents’ Individual and Environmental Influences on Young Adults’ Educational Attainment

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONIn Special Issue of this Journal dedicated to Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Families, Nauck and Settles (2001) examined new challenges confronting family and migration research. They proposed, for example, that future analyses should explore both macro- and micro-level influences when investigating outcomes of children from immigrant families. Similarly, Zhou (1997) suggested that life chances of immigrant children are determined by external and intrinsic factors. he proposed that external determinants include racial stratification, spatial segregation, and economic opportunities. In contrast, intrinsic influences include family structure, community organization, human capital on arrival, and cultural patterns of social relations. The purpose of this study was to build upon previous investigations to examine impact of environmental and individual influences on immigrant children's eventual educational attainment. In analysis, relationships were examined among distal family contexts, proximal learning settings, individual characteristics, and educational attainment of young adults from Australian immigrant families.The conceptual framework for study was constructed from a bioecological model of development proposed by Bronfenbrenner and Ceci (1994) and Ceci et al. (1997), and from Bourdieu's (1984, 1988) theory of educational trajectory of individuals. In bioecological framework it is proposed that to explain variations in outcomes it is necessary to understand relations among distal family contexts, individual characteristics, proximal learning settings such as families and schools, and measures of those outcomes. Bronfenbrenner and Ceci (1994: 572) proposed:The form, power, content and direction of proximal processes affecting development vary systematically as a joint function of characteristics of developing person, of environment - both immediate and more remote - in which processes are taking place, and nature of developmental outcome under consideration.The nature of relationships between family background and outcomes was emphasized by Ceci et al. (1997: 311) who stated the efficacy of a proximal process is determined to a large degree by distal environmental resources. Proximal processes are engines that actually drive outcome but only if distal resources can be imported into process to make it effective.In development of a theory of social trajectory of individuals, Bourdieu (1984, 1998) presented a two-dimensional model of social space. The overall volume of economic and cultural capital possessed by individuals or available to them defined vertical dimension. In contrast, horizontal dimension indicated structure of individuals' capital and it is assessed by relative amounts of economic and cultural capital within total volume of their capital. In field theory, Bourdieu proposed that educational outcomes are associated with two effects that may either reinforce or offset each other. First, there is an inculcation effect exerted directly by families or by individuals' initial social conditions. Second, there is a specific effect related to an individual's system of dispositions or habitus that acts as a mediation between family background and eventual educational attainment. Bourdieu (1984:110) suggested positions of arrival are not equally probable from all starting points. While individuals are subject to forces that structure their social space, they may resist the forces of field with their specific inertia, that is, their properties, which may exist in embodied form, as dispositions, or in objectified form, in goods, qualifications, etc. (1984:110). In addition, Bourdieu (1998: 20) claimed By a series of selection processes, school system separates holders of inherited cultural capital from those who lack it: system tends to maintain preexisting social differences. …