Why and When is Ethnic Harassment a Risk for Immigrant Adolescents’ School Adjustment? Understanding the Processes and Conditions

Ethnically harassed immigrant youth are at risk for experiencing a wide range of school adjustment problems. However, it is still unclear why and under what conditions experiencing ethnic harassment leads to school adjustment difficulties. To address this limitation in the literature, we examined two important questions. First, we investigated whether self-esteem and/or depressive symptoms would mediate the associations between ethnic harassment and poor school adjustment among immigrant youth. Second, we examined whether immigrant youths’ perception of school context would play a buffering role in the pathways between ethnic harassment and school adjustment difficulties. The sample (n = 330; M _age  = 14.07, SD = .90; 49 % girls at T1) was drawn from a longitudinal study in Sweden. The results revealed that experiencing ethnic harassment led to a decrease in immigrant youths’ self-esteem over time, and that youths’ expectations of academic failure increased. Further, youths’ relationships with their teachers and their perceptions of school democracy moderated the mediation processes. Specifically, when youth had poor relationships with their teachers or perceived their school context as less democratic, being exposed to ethnic harassment led to a decrease in their self-esteem. In turn, they reported low school satisfaction and perceived themselves as being unsuccessful in school. Such indirect effects were not observed when youth had high positive relationships with their teachers or perceived their school as offering a democratic environment. These findings highlight the importance of understanding underlying processes and conditions in the examination of the effects of ethnic devaluation experiences in order to reach a more comprehensive understanding of immigrant youths’ school adjustment.     

A new barrier to participation: Heterogeneous application of voter identification policies

In democratic societies there is a tension between maximizing ballot access and minimizing voter fraud. Since the 2000 presidential election, this tension has been central to discussions about election reform at the national, state, and local level. We examine this tension by focusing on the implementation of voter identification laws in one state that has experienced significant issues in recent elections, and that is currently implementing election reform: New Mexico. We hypothesize that Hispanic voters are more likely to show some form of identification than other types of voters. Using a voter data set from New Mexico's First Congressional District in the 2006 election, we find that Hispanic, male and Election Day voters are more likely to show some form of identification than non-Hispanic, female and early voters. In addition, using an overlapping study of Bernalillo County 2006 poll workers, which almost entirely overlaps with the First Congressional District, we find no evidence that differences in poll worker partisanship or ethnicity produce differences in voter identification procedures. Our findings suggest that broad voter identification laws, which may be applied unequally, may be perceived as discriminatory.     

How do Adolescents’ Perceptions of Relationships with Teachers Change during Upper-Secondary School Years?

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - The student-teacher relationship has mostly been assumed to be static. This approach is limited in providing information on how relationships with teachers evolve...     

Filial Daughter? Filial Son? How China’s Young Urban Elite Negotiate Intergenerational Obligations

ABSTRACT

This article deploys narrative method to explore how young adults in China enrolled in higher education negotiate future intergenerational obligations. The study finds that the process through which filial piety is being renegotiated is complex and sometimes contradictory, and norms and values do not always align with practices, as intergenerational obligations need to be managed in tandem with obligations envisioned towards future spouses, as well as work opportunities. Although no longer explicitly son-centred, the intergenerational contract is highly gendered, and patrilineality and patrilocality have not simply become attenuated through some general process of modernization. Rather, there are many ways in which they have become renegotiated, revealing both continuity and change in intergenerational relations. The article illustrates ways in which both patrilineality and patrilocality—whether endorsed, resisted, or negotiated—are still important organizing principles for how intergenerational relations play out. It introduces the concept of “neo-patrilocality” to denote the practice of families channelling resources along the patriline to organize housing for sons in order to enhance their prospect of getting married and having children, a central aspect of filial piety. While filial sons may be involved in more complex relations of reciprocity due to both cultural imperatives and material investments, filial daughters appear to have more leeway in negotiating intergenerational relations. This may reflect a watered-down, but still implicit, understanding that daughters and grandchildren by daughters are outside of the lineage. It seems that, for filial daughters, the parent–adult-child relation is both more intense and more central to filial piety, while for filial sons, intergenerational relations extend beyond the parent–child relation—to grandparents and future children—more than they do for young women. The article concludes that gender relations and intergenerational relations interact and mutually reinforce one another, and that there are differences in class. Patrilineality and neo-patrilocality were more central for affluent and less privileged families than for families belonging to the middle class.     

Cross-ethnic Invariance of Self-esteem and Depression Measures for Chinese,Filipino, and European American Adolescents

Self-esteem and depression are fundamental psychological adjustment constructs in the study of adolescent well-being. Most measures of these constructs have been developed and validated using European American samples, and while the correlates and predictors of psychological adjustment have been examined in multiple cultural settings, no existing research explicitly compares the equivalence of measures of self-esteem or depression for contemporary Chinese, Filipino and European American adolescents. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (the Add Health study), this study examines the factorial invariance of self-esteem and depression measures for European American adolescents and the two largest Asian American ethnic groups in the U.S.: Chinese and Filipino Americans. Results indicate strong evidence for invariance of the measure of self-esteem; however, the often-used measure of depression (CES-D) does not satisfy basic tests of measurement invariance for Asian Americans in this sample.

Election campaigns and the cyclical nature of emotions—How politicians engage in affective polarization

Do politicians get emotional during an election campaign? We examine the existence of changes in partisan in-group favoritism and partisan out-group hostility among political elites by evaluating the degree to which they fluctuate before, during and after election campaigns. The lack of elite level panel data has prevented scholars from studying the dynamics of politicians' emotions around the most emotionally intense political event in democracies: elections. We focus on Sweden around the 2014 election and follow more than 700 Swedish politicians before, during and after a national election campaign using a unique three-wave panel survey. The results reveal that politicians' emotions towards other parties are affected during the election, but less so for their own party. Our study adds to the body of recent evidence that campaigns mobilize partisan identities and increase partisan animus.     

Do citizens care about government debt? Evidence from survey experiments on budgetary priorities

Ever since the Great Recession, public debt has become politicised. Some research suggests that citizens are fiscally conservative, while other research shows that they punish governments for implementing fiscal consolidation. This begs the question of whether and how much citizens care about debt. We argue that debt is not a priority for citizens because reducing it involves spending and tax trade-offs. Using a split-sample experiment and a conjoint experiment in four European countries, we show that fiscal consolidation at the cost of spending cuts or taxes hikes is less popular than commonly assumed. Revenue-based consolidation is especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidation is also contested. Moreover, the public has clear fiscal policy priorities: People do not favour lower debt and taxes, but they support higher progressive taxes to pay for more government spending. The article furthers our understanding of public opinion on fiscal policies and the likely political consequences of austerity.