Exploring Latino Adolescents' Worlds through Multiple Methods
Leslie Reese, Kendall Kroesen, Gery Ryan and Ronald Gallimore (UC Los Angeles)

Studies that have invoked cultural differences to explain the school performance of language minority students have too often focused exclusively on the culture the child brings to school, or the culture of the school itself. Both are considered to contain barriers to optimal performance in American school settings of this population. A promising approach which seeks to move beyond this one-dimensional model of home-school effects is one which identifies the multiple worlds of family, school, and peers inhabited by adolescents, examines the transitions students make as they navigate among potentially incongruent worlds, and seeks links between students' academic achievement and their success in making these transitions (Cooper, Jackson, Azmitia & Lopez, n.d.; Phelan, Davidson & Cao, 1991; Phelan, Davidson & Yu, 1997). This approach not only allows for individual agency to play a role in how adolescents adapt, but also allows us to see cultural understandings and traits as differentially distributed among individuals rather than as a monolithic characteristic of either a language minority or their mainstream schools.

The previous work on the "multiple worlds" of high school and college students concluded that students themselves identify relatively separate worlds within their own lives. In addition, many language minority students talk about experiencing difficulties balancing the contradictory expectations and identities of these different and separate worlds. Those students with greatest difficulty navigating boundaries and who created borders of resistance, for instance between peers and school, also tended to be low achievers. Minority students, with few exceptions, are located in groups with boundaries or borders.

In this study, we utilize a combination of qualitative interview and focus group data and quantitative analysis of interview tasks and responses to describe the multiple worlds of Latino middle school youth in urban settings as they enter adolescence. Our work suggests that in early adolescence the students' worlds are at once more limited and less compartmentalized than may be true for high school students (Kroesen, Reese & Gallimore, 1997). Interpretive analyses of interview data with parents, students and teachers over the period that the adolescents were in sixth and seventh grade have also indicated associations between the types of opportunities that students have to make choices and structure out-of-school activities, alone and with their parents, and their academic performance at school (Reese, Kroesen & Gallimore, 1997). Previous work on parental aspirations and expectations indicated as well the need to take into account parents' own formulations of their future goals and desires for their children, and the cultural models which shape these formulations, in order to better understand the relationship between parental expectations and children's school performance (Reese, Gallimore, Goldenberg & Balzano, 1995). Thus, in this paper, we use a combination of methods to examine how the adolescents themselves describe and organize their worlds, seeking an "emic" or insiders' perspective to complement the analytic ("etic") categories of home, school and peers, and how their own organizing of their worlds may be associated with achievement in early adolescence.

Methods
In-depth interviews consisting mainly of open-ended questions comprised the main body of evidence used in the present study. The sample consisted of 21 Latino families (part of a larger longitudinal sample) made up of parents who were mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and their children most of whom were born in the US. Parents were interviewed in Spanish at home; teachers were interviewed in English at school. Students were interviewed in the place and language of their choice. Some topics were covered in both parent and child interviews: daily routine, study habits, hobbies, friendships, family experiences, neighborhood safety and characteristics, school performance and interest, hopes and plans for the future. Other topics were covered in teacher and student interviews: academic performance, behavior in and out of class, motivation, peer groups at school. To supplement interview data, the following methods were utilized, each one providing additional insight into adolescents' views of their lives:

1. Photos of people and things that were important to the student. Each child was given a disposable camera and asked to take pictures of people and things that were important in his or her life. Later, the photos were discussed with the investigator, who asked who was pictured, what was going on, where they were, and why the picture was taken (i.e. what did the student want to capture). The goal was to bring to the interview setting parts of the students' lives that might not have emerged in the structured protocols.

2. Photo sorts. After describing the photos, the student was asked to sort the pictures into piles that went together and then describe each pile. The goal was to see how the students construct categories of important people and things in their lives, without suggesting given categories such as "family" or "school."

3. List of important people. Students were asked to make a list of the people that are important to them in their lives, and then tell the investigator who the people were and what their relations to the child were.

4. "Worlds" paper: To try to tap into children's worlds that they might not have spoken about much or photographed, we asked them to select from a given list of "worlds" those that pertained to them. The words for these worlds were printed in a randomly scattered way on a sheet of paper and included: "family you live with," "other family," "church," "neighborhood," "mall/arcade," "clubs," "school," "friend's house," "sports," "band/music," "other." (Our thanks to Catherine Cooper and her team at University of California, Santa Cruz for inspiration and help with this method.) After they circled their choices, we asked them to describe why they chose the ones they did, and not the others. We later performed analyses of principal coordinates and multidimensional scaling in an effort to identify patterns of selection of groups within the sample.

5. Focus groups: Finally, three focus groups were carried out with students in the longitudinal sample, again with the intent of revealing attitudes or information that may not have surfaced in one-on-one interviews. In an effort to get at other worlds besides those identified through the photo activities and the worlds page, and to identify potential borders and boundaries among and between worlds, the groups were presented with vignettes which dealt with students in morally ambiguous situations and asked how they would explain and predict the behavior of characters in the vignettes and then to reflect on the pertinence of these situations to their own lives.

Findings
Family emerged as the most important world in the lives of the Latino adolescents from immigrant families, a finding consistent across all of the methods above. Adolescents' worlds were also found to be restricted, with limitations on adolescents' activities and friendships which were more severe for the girls but were in place to a greater or lesser extent for all students in the sample. Parents were diligent about protecting their children for as long as possible from the effects of gang- and drug-infested neighborhoods and from the malas amistades ("bad peers") who might have lead their children off the good path in life (Reese, Balzano, Gallimore & Goldenberg, 1995)

Multiple methods also portrayed worlds as permeable (with activities, actors and affective ties that cross etic world categories) and amorphous (not clearly bounded). Adolescents' worlds overlapped, as important people cross-cut activities and activities cross-cut settings. We also found that the adolescents in our sample were not particularly different from each other in their perceptions of their worlds. On the other hand, achievement does show a broad range (e.g., standardized test scores in English in grade 7 ranging from 1 to 95 in math and 1 to 91 in reading). Because of the conditions above, we did not observe border crossings to be particularly problematic for students in our sample nor to be associated with low performance.

When we looked at emic world constructions, we observed that the adolescents' often did not use etic categories, or used them in idiosyncratic ways. For example, "friends" often included cousins and aunts, as well as neighborhood and school friends. Their worlds were sometimes constructed by affective ties such as "things I like" or "people who are nice to me," or they revealed interior states such as a perception of "God, and all the other gods, and the girl gods too." Kids' worlds were not geographically or temporally bounded. For example, for one boy "family that you live with" included two cousins who used to live with him but who then resided in Mexico and were his godfathers when he made his first communion there the summer before. Use of etic categories of home/school/peers alone do not seem capture the essence of how our kids see their lives.

This suggests that the construction of separate, bounded worlds may be a developmental process which is only beginning in early adolescence. For students in our sample, we found that the borders between worlds which were hypothesized to make achievement in school problematic were the exception rather than the rule. Thus, the developmental nature of the solidification of adolescents' worlds calls into question a causal sequence in which cultural discontinuities result in the creation of boundaries/borders, which in turn result in low performance.

Implications for Educators
1. A notion of complementarities between home and school (Goldenberg & Gallimore, 1995), suggested by the lack of separate worlds--and parental values and expectations which echo those of teachers--opens the door to greater levels of home-school collaboration than an emphasis on cultural discontinuities does. A "complementarities" focus offers the possibility of identifying specific ways of drawing families into collaborative activity with the school, without necessarily being identical to teachers in strategies and activities at home.

2. The importance of family, including extended family that may live close by, in lives of young adolescents, is a resource to be tapped by teachers more systematically than has been done in past. This refers not only to funds of cultural knowledge that teachers may exploit, but funds of cultural strategies that immigrant parents are already actively adapting to the local community context.

3. Findings support current policies to create community centers at school sites and greatly increase after-school activities for kids at school. In dangerous areas, many parents are reluctant to have children involved at activities that take them away from the safety of home and the immediate home environment, but school remains a setting in which they have more confidence.

4. Home country "worlds"--for a substantial number of students in the sample--provided a source of prior experience to be tapped in class lessons to a much greater extent than is currently the practice in most classrooms.

References
Cooper, C., Jackson, J., Azmitia, M., Lopez, E. & Dunbar, N. (n.d.). Bridging Students' Multiple Worlds: African American and Latino Youth in Academic Outreach Programs. Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, unpublished manuscript.

Goldenberg, C. N. & Gallimore, R. (1995). Immigrant Latino parents' values and beliefs about their children's education: Continuities and discontinuities across cultures and generations. In P. Pintrich & M. Maehr (Eds.), Advances in motivation and achievement ,Vol. 9., 183-227.

Kroesen, K., Reese, L. & Gallimore, R. (1997, November). "The Daily Worlds of Urban Latino Youth." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C.

Phelan, P., Davidson, A.L. & Cao, H.T. (1991). Students' Multiple Worlds: Negotiating the Boundaries of Family, Peer, and School Cultures. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 22 (3): 224-250.

Phelan, P., Davidson, A.L. & Yu, H.C. (1997). Adolescents' Worlds: Negotiating Family, Peers and School. New York: Teachers College Press.

Reese, L., Balzano, S., Gallimore, R. and Goldenberg, C. (1995) The Concept of Educación: Latino Family Values and American Schooling. International Journal of Education Research 23 (1), 57-81.

Reese, L.J., Gallimore, R., Goldenberg, C., & Balzano, S. (1995). "Immigrant Latino Parents' Future Orientations for their Children." In R. Macias & R.G. Ramos (eds.). Changing Schools for Changing Students. Regents of the University of California: UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute Publication.

Reese, L., Kroesen, K. & Gallimore, R. (1997, March). "Agency and School Performance among Urban Latino Youth." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago.