Examining the Support Provided to Children of Immigrant Families When Language Brokering

In the United States, adult immigrants often rely on younger family members as language brokers—children (e.g., preadolescent, adolescent, emerging adult children) of immigrant families who linguistically and culturally mediate for two or more parties from different cultural backgrounds. Past research has found that brokering can be associated with positive and negative outcomes for children of immigrant families. Such outcomes, however, likely depend on a host of conditions (e.g., how immigrant children feel about brokering, how familiar they are with English and U.S. mainstream practices, their parent-child relational quality). One particularly important factor to consider is the extent to which parents create a supportive and safe environment for immigrant children to interpret. Past research has often relied on self-reported interview or survey data to identify how parent-child relational quality can create a supportive environment for language brokering. However, we know very little of what supportive communication or unsupportive communication looks like from parents during an actual brokering interaction. Thus, the goal of this project is to examine the support (or lack of support) that parents provide to immigrant children during a language brokering interaction. Videotaped observational data will be obtained to capture brokering between parent-child dyads (condition one) and parent-child-U.S.-mainstream-member triads (condition two). The videotaped interactions will be coded for supportive and non-supportive communication provided by parents in the two conditions. Identifying the ways in which parents verbally and nonverbally support immigrant children when brokering can inform the development of community-based resources intended to enhance the wellbeing of immigrant families.

Kam, J. A. (PI). 2020-2021. Institute for Social, Behavioral & Economic Research Small Research Grant, UC Santa Barbara ($8,000).