Exploring Individual-, Family-, and Neighborhood-Level Predictors of Acculturation in Hispanic Youth

Abstract

Background Immigrants account for 13% of the US population. Hispanic individuals are among the largest and fastest growing demographic groups, yet face challenges such as language barriers, prejudice and racism, and political litigation. Additionally, all immigrants and culturally minoritized groups must navigate the acculturation process, which describes how an individual acquires and adjusts to a new culture. Acculturation to the dominant culture is associated with both positive (e.g., greater academic achievement) and negative (e.g., health risk behaviors) outcomes, particularly for adolescents given large shifts in identity and social behavior that occur during this developmental period. Although research has examined predictors of acculturation among Hispanic youth, these investigations largely focus on single predictors (e.g., experienced racism, immigrant generation) within a single ecological level of influence (e.g., family or neighborhood). Lastly, most of this work leverages small community-based samples, limiting our understanding of population generalizability. This project will explore individual-, family-, and neighborhood-level predictors of acculturation in Hispanic youth. The specific research questions include: 1) Which individual-level risk or promotive factor is most strongly associated with youth acculturation? 2) Which family-level risk or promotive factor is most strongly associated with youth acculturation? 3) Which neighborhood-level risk or promotive factor is most strongly associated with youth acculturation? 4) Out of all individual-, family-, and neighborhood-level risk and promotive factors, which will be most strongly associated with youth acculturation? Methods A sample of 1694 subjects was used. The data exclusions to the analytic sample was that only youth described as Hispanic or Latinx by their caregivers were included. Additionally, the Youth Phenx Acculturation measure of the dependent variables required that the youth speak more than one language to complete the measure. As a result, the sample will also only be composed of youth who spoke Spanish. First, one random child per family was selected for analysis. Second, a ridge regression was used to assess the strength of the associations between risk and protective factors across ecological contexts and youth acculturation. Ridge regression, also called L2 regularization, applies a penalty term to shrink less impactful coefficients closer to zero without fully removing them from the model (Simon et al., 2016). The use of this penalty term accounts for multicollinearity between predictors, reducing bias in parameters, and allows us to examine the unique contribution of risk and promotive factors known to be correlated (Duzan and Shariff, 2015). Bootstrapping (K=1000) replications were used to calculate a confidence interval of 95% and assess the significance of the results. Analyses were conducted in R Statistical Software version 4.2.2 (R Core Team, 2022) using the glmnet package (Friedman et al., 2010). Results The predictors which impacted youth acculturation positively towards American culture included greater parental acculturation (β =0.13), suburban area residency (β =0.18), being U.S born (β =0.08), and living in a state with greater immigrant bias (β =0.03). Meanwhile factors which impacted youth acculturation negatively towards American culture include living in neighborhoods with greater Hispanic ethnic density (β = -0.20), greater familism values (β = -0.05), and urban area residency (β = -0.10). Many demographic factors such as caregiver education level (β = 0.02), whether the household had a single or dual caregivers (β =0.04, -0.03), and income to needs ratio (β =0.03) had little effect on youth acculturation. Discussion The results of this research have provided insight into informing our understanding of the factors that guide acculturation among Hispanic youth. The individual-level risk or promotive factor most associated with youth acculturation level was being U.S born. The family-level risk or promotive factor most strongly associated with youth acculturation was familism. The neighborhood-level risk or promotive factor most strongly associated with youth acculturation was Hispanic neighborhood ethnic density. Lastly, out of all individual-, family-, and neighborhood-level risk or primitive factors the strongest associated with youth acculturation was again Hispanic neighborhood ethnic density. A pattern among some of the strongest predictors of both positive and negative acculturation outcomes such as Hispanic neighborhood ethnic density, state level immigrant bias, and rural vs urban address residence, was all being socio-environmental based predictors. This indicates the importance of environmental level factors in the youth’s developmental processes. Additionally, familism being a strong negative predictor of acculturation points to parent socialization being an essential component of youth's developmental processes as well. By leveraging data from adolescents and families in the nationwide ABCD Study and implementing a rigorous machine learning approach, these results can contribute to a generalizable understanding of developmental processes in immigrant youth. However, there were still limitations such as the measure of acculturation solely using language as its proxy measure. Future directions should use a more varied and inclusive acculturation measure, look into why socio-environmental factors had such a big impact, especially ethnic neighborhood density, and explore how parent socialization can be used to develop culturally appropriate interventions to support the mental well-being of immigrant youth populations.