Parenting Style and College Attendance among East Asian and Mexican American Youth from Immigrant Families

Hongbo Wang, University of California, Los Angeles

This study addresses the association between parenting style and college attendance among East Asian and Mexican youth from immigrant families in the United States. There previously is evidence that, whereas Asian American youth with restrictive parents tend to fare well in school, findings are mixed for their Hispanic counterparts. Drawing mainly on data from the Add Health, I further explore this Asian-Hispanic disparity by examining the role of parenting style in impacting college attendance among East Asian (i.e. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese) and Mexican youth. Specifically, I construct a three-stage design and resort to the propensity score matching technique to test how restrictive or controlling parents may affect their children’s likelihood of attending college in East Asian and Mexican immigrant families, many of them economically disadvantaged. Additionally, sensitivity analysis and use of multiple imputation for handling missing data will render the analysis an even solider ground.