Bicultural competence and academic adjustment across Latino youth adaptation from high school to college

Abstract

This study investigated the association between bicultural competence and academic adjustment (i.e., engagement, efficacy, achievement) among 193 Latino youth (65.3% female; 89.1% U.S.‐born) followed from their senior high school year (Mage = 17.58 years, SD = 0.53) to their fifth college semester (2016–2019). Latent growth analyses revealed that youth's overall bicultural competence trajectory was moderately high and stable across this period. Youth who maintained or increased bicultural competence levels over time (slopes) demonstrated greater self‐efficacy. Youth with greater high school bicultural competence (intercepts) demonstrated higher engagement but lower achievement. No other associations emerged. This study highlights that the promoting influence of bicultural competence may not extend to all indicators of academic adjustment but may depend upon the contexts and demands they navigate.

Contextualizing Bicultural Competence Across Youths’ Adaptation From High School to College: Prospective Associations With Mental Health and Substance Use

“…facility and with a −.14-unit decrease in T5 bicultural comfort, controlling for the underlying trajectories of bicultural facility and comfort and family immigrant status. Consistent with our prior work (Safa et al, 2022), we found that on average, youths in nonimmigrant families had lower intercepts, or predicted values of bicultural comfort, in high school (β = −0.17, SE = 0.08, p = .025) compared with youths in immigrant families and accounting for the bicultural-facility intercept, changes in bicultural comfort over time, and time-varying experiences of discrimination. Family immigrant status was not significantly associated with the other growth factors (i.e., bicultural-facility intercept and bicultural-comfort slope).…”

“…Little research has mapped out developmental trajectories of bicultural competence in adolescence and young adulthood, leaving unanswered the question of whether its behavioral and affective components remain stable or change over time and how these trajectories relate to one another, particularly as youths adapt to college. Our research has identified that accounting for family-immigrant status, joint facets of behavioral and affective bicultural competence (i.e., average of bicultural facility and comfort) are relatively high and stable throughout the adaptation to college (Safa et al, 2022). However, no study, to our knowledge, has traced the separate but simultaneous development of bicultural facility and comfort as youths progress through college.…”

“…Individuals, however, may experience high levels of bicultural facility (e.g., have high levels of bicultural skills) and simultaneously low bicultural comfort (e.g., feel uncomfortable using bicultural skills) or vice versa. Bicultural facility requires that individuals are proficient or skillful in regulating their own behavior in different contexts (David et al, 2009) and may leverage mechanisms that are implicated in general psychological adjustment (e.g., self-advocacy, engagement; Carbajal et al, 2022;Safa et al, 2022) and in mental-health domains, such as externalizing symptoms (Eisenberg et al, 2001;Safa et al, 2018). Bicultural comfort, on the other hand, involves individuals' positive affect or perceived comfort relying on their bicultural skills (Basilio et al, 2014;David et al, 2009) and may resemble affective mechanisms linked with depressive or anxiety symptoms (Poh et al, 2021) or facilitate social comfort (Carbajal et al, 2022) that may inform substance use patterns during college.…”

“…Developmental trajectories of bicultural competence across the transition and adaptation to college may have important implications for Latino youths' adjustment (Safa et al, 2022) and, thus, later mental-health equity. The median age of onset for substance use disorders and for 75% of all lifetime cases of mental-health disorders defined by the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), occur during the emergence into adulthood (i.e., ages 20-24; Kessler et al, 2005).…”

“…Two participants withdrew from the study after the third wave, and one participant withdrew after the fifth wave. These participants were thus excluded in analyses (analytic n = 206; Safa et al, 2022).…”