A Longitudinal Study of Educational Adaptation among Immigrant Youth: The Role of Immigrant Generation, Ethnicity, and Friendship Network

Ping Chen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Due to data limitations, previous studies often lack a national picture and took a cross-sectional approach to examine educational adaptation of immigrant children. This is limited in viewing educational experience as a changing process. To address these limitations, I use new longitudinal national data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study (AHAA) (part of Add Health data) to conduct a longitudinal study of academic achievement among immigrant youth through three goals: (1) exploring immigrant generational differences in academic growth-curves in terms of initial status and rate of change among high-school immigrant youth; (2) assessing racial/ethnic differences in their academic trajectories; (3) examining the mediating effects of friendship networks (measured by composition of immigrant generations and ethnicities) on patterns of academic trajectories over time.