Original articleAcculturation and the health and well-being of U.S. immigrant adolescents
Section snippets
Methods
The data used in this study are drawn from the 1997–1998 World Health Organization Study of Health Behavior in School Children (HBSC), a cross-national research study focusing on the health, health behaviors, and lifestyles of young people 25, 26. This is a nationally representative survey sample of youth in grades 6 to 10 in U.S. schools. The subjects included students who answered anonymous standardized questionnaires during the spring of 1998 in 386 schools in the United States. The
Results
The demographic distribution of the study population is displayed in Table 1. In three of the racial/ethnic groups, females represented just over half of the study population, although males were the majority among Asian respondents. In all four groups, the respondents were concentrated in the mid-adolescent age group (aged 12–15 years). Among all of the non-Hispanic groups, more than half of respondents' mothers had more than a high-school education, but this percentage was lower among
Discussion
This analysis demonstrates the complex relationships among immigration, race/ethnicity, and linguistic assimilation. Adolescents of all racial and ethnic groups from a non-English home environment are at higher risk of a range of psychosocial and parental risk factors than the majority population of non-Hispanic white English-speakers. Adolescents who speak other languages at home, exclusively, or in combination with English, are particularly likely to report feelings of vulnerability,
Acknowledgements
The opinions expressed in this paper are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the institutions with which the authors are affiliated.
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