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1. Immigrant Legal Status Disparities in Health Among First- and One-point-five-Generation Latinx Immigrants in California

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-021-09689-w  

   Hamilton, Erin R. ; Patler, Caitlin ; Savinar, Robin ( December 2021 , Population Research and Policy Review)

   Restrictive US immigration laws and law enforcement undermine immigrant health by generating fear and stress, disrupting families and communities, and eroding social and economic wellbeing. The inequality and stress created by immigration law and law enforcement may also generate disparities in health among immigrants with different legal statuses. However, existing research does not find consistent evidence of immigrant legal status disparities in health, possibly because it does not disaggregate immigrants by generation, defined by age at migration. Immigration and life course theory suggest that the health consequences of non-citizen status may be greater among 1.5-generation immigrants, who grew up in the same society that denies them formal membership, than among the 1st generation, who immigrated as adolescents or adults. In this study, we examine whether there are legal status disparities in health within and between the 1st generation and the 1.5 generation of 23,288 Latinx immigrant adults interviewed in the 2005–2017 waves of the California Health Interview Survey. We find evidence of legal status disparities in heart disease within the 1st generation and for high blood pressure and diabetes within the 1.5 generation. Non-citizens have higher rates of poor self-rated health and distress within both generations. Socioeconomic disadvantage andmore »limited access to care largely account for the worse health of legally disadvantaged 1st- and 1.5-generation Latinx adults in California.

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2. “Because I’m Not Always Constantly Getting Everything Right”: Gender Differences in Engineering Identity Formation in Elementary Students

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--33967  

   Hoch, Annmarie ; Miel, Karen ; Portsmore, Merredith ; Swanson, Rebecca ( January 2020 , American Society of Engineering Education)

   Developing a strong engineering identity, or sense of belonging in engineering, is essential to pursuing and persisting in the field. Participating in an engineering outreach program is widely seen as an opportunity for youth to ignite and increase an identity as an engineer. As early as elementary school, youth evaluate their experiences, interests, and successes to make choices about possible futures. Although these early experiences and choices influence future participation in, pursuit of, and persistence in engineering, studies of engineering identity development have concentrated on undergraduate and high school learners. This study examines engineering identity development in elementary school students participating in an engineering education outreach program, expanding understanding of early influences on engineering identity formation. This study asks: How do students’ descriptions of their engineering experiences indicate the influence their experiences have on their engineering identity development? This study is embedded in an NSF-funded study of a university-led engineering education outreach program. In this program, pairs of university students facilitated weekly hour-long engineering design challenges in elementary classrooms throughout the school year. At the end of the academic year, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 76 fourth- and fifth-grade students who had participated in the outreach program. The interviewers askedmore »students to rate their enjoyment of and skills in engineering within the context of the program. Iterative qualitative coding was used to elicit emergent patterns in students’ responses and examine them in the context of the Godwin et al (2016) engineering identity framework, using the constructs of interest, performance/competence, and recognition. Responses were then analyzed based on participants’ gender to understand and identify potential differences in influences on engineering identity development. Findings indicate that student talk around interest tended to be more positive, while student talk around performance/competence tended to be more negative, indicating the type of relationships students had with their interest in engineering compared to their perceived skills in doing engineering. However, within the construct of performance/competence, girls used negative language at a higher frequency than boys. Within this construct-based code, there were categories with large variations in positive and negative talk by gender. These gendered patterns provide insight into the differing ways girls and boys interact with engineering and how they start to develop engineering identities.« less
3. Exploring the Relationship between Mindfulness and Personality to Improve Construction Safety and Work Performance

   Solomon, T. ; Esmaeili, B. ( March 2020 , Construction Research Congress 2020)

   The construction industry still leads the world as one of the sectors with the most work-related injuries and worker fatalities. Recent studies show that both a state of mindfulness and various personality traits contribute to individuals’ safety and work performance. This study examines the relationship between mindfulness and personality by measuring the mindfulness state of individuals against their personality traits. To achieve this objective, data were collected from a sample of 55 undergraduate students at George Mason University. Scores from the Big Five Inventory were ranked by each traits’ score (independent variable) and split into three groups: high, moderate, and low scores. The corresponding mindfulness scores (dependent variable) were analyzed to determine the relationship between high/low personality traits and mindfulness. Comparing the high/low groups using statistical analyses showed that three of the five personality traits—conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism—significantly correlate with higher mindfulness scores of individuals. As mindfulness has been shown to increase individual safety and work performance and to reduce stress, the results of this study help inform future work into translating personality and mindfulness characteristics into factors that predict specific elements of unsafe human behaviors.
4. Profiles of Language Brokering Experiences and Contextual Stressors: Implications for Adolescent Outcomes in Mexican Immigrant Families

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-018-0851-4  

   Kim, Su Yeong ; Hou, Yang ; Song, Jiaxiu ; Schwartz, Seth J. ; Chen, Shanting ; Zhang, Minyu ; Perreira, Krista M. ; Parra-Medina, Deborah ( January 2018 , Journal of Youth and Adolescence)

   Adolescents from Mexican immigrant families are often embedded in a challenging social environment and experience multiple contextual stressors, including economic stress, discrimination, and foreigner stress. We consider how the effects of these contextual stressors may be amplified or diminished for adolescents who function as language brokers, interpreting and mediating for their English-limited parents. Using two waves of survey data collected from a sample (N = 604 at Wave 1; N = 483 at Wave 2) of Mexican American adolescents with ages ranging from 11 to 15 (Mage = 12.41, 54% female), four distinct brokering – stress profiles were identified. Latent profile analyses revealed that with moderate levels of contextual stress, adolescents with more positive language brokering experiences (protective group) demonstrated more favorable outcomes than those with neutral language brokering experiences (moderate group) and those who did not involve themselves as frequently in language brokering activities (less-involved group). In contrast, high levels of contextual stress, coupled with more negative language brokering experiences (risk group), produced the least favorable outcomes among adolescents.
5. No intrinsic gender differences in children’s earliest numerical abilities

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-018-0028-7  

   Kersey, Alyssa J. ; Braham, Emily J. ; Csumitta, Kelsey D. ; Libertus, Melissa E. ; Cantlon, Jessica F. ( July 2018 , npj Science of Learning)

   Recent public discussions have suggested that the under-representation of women in science and mathematics careers can be traced back to intrinsic differences in aptitude. However, true gender differences are difficult to assess because sociocultural influences enter at an early point in childhood. If these claims of intrinsic differences are true, then gender differences in quantitative and mathematical abilities should emerge early in human development. We examined cross-sectional gender differences in mathematical cognition from over 500 children aged 6 months to 8 years by compiling data from five published studies with unpublished data from longitudinal records. We targeted three key milestones of numerical development: numerosity perception, culturally trained counting, and formal and informal elementary mathematics concepts. In addition to testing for statistical differences between boys’ and girls’ mean performance and variability, we also tested for statistical equivalence between boys’ and girls’ performance. Across all stages of numerical development, analyses consistently revealed that boys and girls do not differ in early quantitative and mathematical ability. These findings indicate that boys and girls are equally equipped to reason about mathematics during early childhood.