Tag: Ellen McWhirter

The Role of Mentoring and Ethnic Identity in Latinx* High School Students

Presenter(s): Alejandra Miranda − Psychology, Spanish

Faculty Mentor(s): Ellen McWhirter

Oral Session 2M

Research Area: Social Science

Funding: McNair Scholarship

Latinx students remain significantly underrepresented at four-year colleges and universities (Fry & Taylor, 2013). For this reason, examining associations between mentoring, ethnic identity, and postsecondary plans in Latinx students may help to explain the continuing underrepresentation in higher education. This study discovers associations between mentoring, ethnic identity, and post-high school plans (PLANS) in 665 Latinx high school students. Mentoring helps integrate and connect students to academic experiences (Crisp et al., 2017). Unfortunately, many Latinx parents are unable to provide their children with academic support to pursue a higher education due to various factors such as language barriers, work, or lack of education (Ceballo, 2004). Ethnic identity is also found to be a strong predictor of school engagement and school positivity (Booth et al., 2014). In general, Latinx families put great value on education, hard work, and family. In this study, we hypothesize that first, students who report low mentoring and ethnic identity will choose “community/2 year” or “no school” PLANS significantly more than those who have high mentoring and ethnic identity. This study will also examine sex as an additional influential factor, in response to an increase in Latinas pursuing higher education (Gloria et al., 2005). Therefore, our second hypothesis is that females will report more mentoring and ethnic identity than males. Altogether, this study examines mentoring, ethnic identity, and sex impact on PLANS. The present study uses existing data from participants at a regional conference for Latinx high school students. A one- way analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis is used to examine mentoring and ethnic identity correlation with PLANS. A factorial multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) is used to examine differences between PLANS (no school, community/2 year, and 2 plus 4 or 4 years) and dependent variables (mentoring and ethnic identity). Findings yield to a better understanding of the importance of mentoring and ethnic identity in Latinxs future educational plans. *Latinx is a gender-neutral, forward term that encapsulates all individuals and breaks away with the classification of gender.

What does it mean to be Latinx to you?: An Analysis of Oregon Latinx Students and Their Ethnic Identity

Presenter(s): Maya Auld—Family and Human Services

Faculty Mentor(s): Ellen McWhirter

Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation

Ethnic and Racial Identity (ERI) refers to a multidimensional psychological construct that represents the beliefs, values, and attitudes that an individual has about their ethnic-racial group and group membership and the process by which these beliefs develop over the lifespan (Umaña-Taylor et al ., 2014). ERI is a protective factor for Latinx adolescents that can enable resiliency when confronted with discrimination (Phinney, 2003; Romero & Roberts 2003) . ERI is positively related to academic self-efficacy, social competence, leadership, and social responsibility among Latinx high school students (Umaña-Taylor et al ., 2014) .

The current political and social environment threatens positive identity as anti-immigration and anti-Latinx sentiments are increasing (Muste, 2013; Rogers et al ., 2017) . This negative public regard for the Latinx community has fueled several thousand pieces of legislation in regard to immigration in the past decade at the state level, largely involving law enforcement of verification of immigration status (Stupi et al ., 2016) . Both US and foreign-born Latinx individuals suffer similar levels of psychological destress related to negative public regard of immigrants (Szkupinski et al ., 2014) .

The setting for the current study is a Pacific Northwest state in which 23% of k-12 students are Latinx (Gill et al ., 2019) . Data for the present study, collected in spring of 2019, is written responses to the question “What does it mean to you to be Latina/o/x?” Participants were 495 Latinx high school students attending a one-day leadership conference . First, responses were coded using inductive thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006) . Themes present in open ended responses include culture, pride, community, family, language, and resistance . Second, we explored relationships between themes, academic achievement, and attendance in school . This part of the analysis is ongoing . We elaborate on findings and highlight the importance of positive regard of ethnic identity for Latinx high school students in the Pacific Northwest .