School composition and the acculturation experience: How classmates shape Latino students' cultural identity

This study examined how school composition influences Latino students' acculturation process—that is, how certain characteristics of school peers influence the pace and outcome of individual acculturation and the experience of acculturation stress. Conceptualization was guided by Berry's acculturation framework and Blau's macrostructural theory, which posits that differentiation within a social structure, characterized in part by the heterogeneity of groups, has implications for the integration of its members. This study assessed the size of groups in the school population and its effect on students' cultural integration, focusing on school groups distinguished by acculturation level (more acculturated versus less acculturated), experience of acculturation stress (stressed versus not stressed), and perception of discrimination (perceives discrimination versus does not perceive discrimination). Data came from a longitudinal drug prevention study conducted by researchers from Arizona State University. Surveys were administered in Fall 2004-early Spring 2005 (wave 1) and late Spring-Summer 2005 (wave 2). The sample consisted of 1,720 Latino 5th grade students from public schools in a large metropolitan city in the Southwest. This secondary data analysis included multi-level modeling to account for the nesting of students within schools and multiple imputation to account for missing data. Results were that the size of various school groups was related to the pace and outcome of individual youths' acculturation but not to their acculturation stress. Youths in schools with larger proportions of linguistically acculturated students were more acculturated at baseline and acculturated more quickly across time than youths in schools with smaller proportions of such students. These effects did not differ for more acculturated youth and less acculturated youth. Furthermore, these effects appeared to be driven by students' acculturation in the friends and media domains, rather than their acculturation in the family domain.