The Effect of Immigrant Status on Mental Health and Academic Success
Benjamin L. Richie
Virginia Military Institute
Author Note
I would like to thank my brother rats for their help throughout this research process and to the VMI Corps of Cadets for dutifully and consistently completing surveys for psychology students.
Correspondence concerning this study should be addressed to Benjamin Richie at Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia 24450 or electronically via richiebl17@mail.vmi.edu.
Abstract
This study intends to find an association between undergraduate students’ immigrant status and their academic success and mental health. We are conducting a survey and electronically distributing it to specific individuals and the student body of the Virginia Military Institute. We then analyze the responses from 121 participants excluding one participant that is excluded for not cooperating with participant requirements. Immigrant status is defined as having been in the United States for 5 or less years. In order to measure academic success, students are asked to select the variable (1-5) that corresponds with the range in which their GPA lies. A student’s mental health has two factors, stress and depression, and are measured using the Perceived Stress Scale and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. We suggest that there is no significant difference between immigrants and non-immigrants in terms of mental health but there is a significant difference in GPA between the two groups. Due to the number of significant limitations in this study we must look at these findings skeptically. While the GPA is consistent with past research, the mental health scores do not match; possibly due to the lack of respondents who identify as an academic immigrant.
The Effect of Immigrant Status on Mental Health and Academic Success
The United States was founded on the hard work and mental toughness of immigrants leaving Europe. We would like to believe that the dedication to learning and work is passed down to the second and third generations of immigrants, but this may not be the case. However, researchers have found evidence that this may not be the case. Dr. Duong and others found results suggesting that first generation immigrants earn better grades than their second or third generation counterparts (Duong, Liu, Schwartz & Mccarty, 2013). Dr. Duong says that this may reflect a more positive attitude and successful academic behaviors (Duong et. al., 2013). Unfortunately, some immigrants are more likely to attain a higher level of education if they come from a higher SES, regardless of levels of self-aspiration (Subrebost and DeSilva, 2003). This may be solely because of financial security but a steady financial situation, or lack of a financial crisis, creates a feeling of confidence and most likely decreases stress and the chance of depression. On the contrary, Zajacova suggests that academic self-efficacy, or belief in one’s ability to succeed, is a more robust and consistent predictor of academic success (Zajacova, Lynch & Espenshade, 2005).
With these contrasting views, the similarity lies in the ability of mental strength and health as a possible predictor for academic success. Thus, should a student come to the United States with the determination to get an undergraduate education in America, their success may depend on mental health, but, immigrants also tend to take more difficult paths through their college career. One study found that those first or second generation immigrants that are studying at a higher level are more likely to pursue a mathematics or science related degree (Subrebost & DeSilva, 2003). Dr. Tseng says that these aspirations are remarkable because one third of high school immigrants have parents who did not hold a high school diploma or equivalent.
While immigrants seem to be excelling academically and have very high aspirations, we worry that there may be too many stressors in their everyday life for them to reach their full potential. In 2011, Lucila Ramos-Sanchez performed a study of 100 undocumented and 98 documented Latino immigrants. As expected, she found that undocumented immigrants experience significantly more stress than documented immigrants (Ramos-Sanchez, 2011). In a 2002 poll of 945 Muslims across the United States, 57% percent reported that they had experienced bias or discrimination, 87% indicated that they knew someone that had experienced bias or discrimination and, surprisingly, 47% agreed that their lives had actually changed for the worse (Amer, 2007). These numbers seem to reflect ABC News’ poll in 2006 indicating that 46% of Americans held unfavorable opinions about Islam (Amer, 2007). It is not unlikely that immigrants may feel out of place in a foreign country, which could cause an increase in feelings of stress or depression. Data suggest that, because the acculturation process is so much more multidimensional than people think, depression is very prevalent among urban Asian immigrant elders (Mui & Kang, 2006). Furthermore, immigrant youth in Hong Kong who had moved from mainland China experienced a greater amount of stress in finding a suitable place to live, catching up with schoolwork due to poor English, worrying about the future, and feeling incompetent and inferior to Hong Kong people (Wong, 2004).
Educators and policymakers often believe that immigrant children perform better in school if they and their families culturally assimilate and assume the characteristics of prevalent in the dominant mainstream society, but this may not be the case (Akiba, 2003). Daisuke Akiba explains that their findings “categorically and diametrically deny the zero-sum assumption that cultural retention leads to lower academic performance. (Akiba, 2003, p. 224)” So if undergraduate immigrant students are not given the time to personally acculturate into the United States, they should also not have lower academic performance.
Much of the, above mentioned, prior research has been adequately conducted but does not study the target population that we wish to learn more about; undergraduate, documented immigrants who have been in the United States for less than 5 years. Furthermore, there has been research on mental health having an impact on education and immigrants having a strong desire to succeed, but the research looking at immigrants’ actual success is scarce. Therefore, we chose to create a survey that measures stress and depression levels as well as college performance, scored through GPA. This study will combine the efforts of most of the mentioned studies and attempt to attempt to expand on the current data. As we have three dependent variables, we developed two hypotheses. Our first hypothesis was that undergraduate immigrants who have been in the United States for less than 5 years will experience a higher incidence of stress and or depression and, thus, be classified as have lower mental health. Our second hypothesis is that immigrant students will have higher academic performance, success, than their non-immigrant peers.
Methods
Participants
121 participants (90 men, 31 women; 116 non-immigrants, 5 immigrants) attending undergraduate universities in the United States were asked to complete a survey. All survey materials were either generic demographic material or approved by Col. Gire, the Psychology department head at the Virginia Military Institute. Participants were gathered on a convenience basis using email blasts, social media prompts and personal requests. One, immigrant, participant had to be excluded because he or she indicating that they were a student at a university outside the United States.
Research Materials
Our study utilized two widely used personality surveys; David Cohen’s 10-question Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the 9-question Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). The questions were integrated into a neutral titled survey in order to hide the intention of the questions. This scale consists of ten questions asking participants to self-report on various indicators of stress within the past month such as respondents’ ability to control what is going on around them or their ability to cope with unexpected events. Participants answered by circling numbers 1 through 5 indicating an increase in frequency of each of the given feelings (ie. 1 = Never; 5 = Very Often). According to Dr. Eun-Hyun Lee, the PSS has an unsatisfactory correlation of .55 but because the Scale is widely accepted and used, I continued regardless of Dr. Lee’s findings (Lee, 2012).
The PHQ-9 consists of nine questions that measures the depression level of the survey participant. Just as the Perceived Stress Scale questions were, the PHQ-9 questions were not titled in order to mask the questions’ overall purpose. The questions ask about “problems” related to depression the participants may have been facing in the past two weeks such as trouble sleeping, eating or an overall feeling of pleasure. Participants were, again, instructed to circle the number corresponding with the answer the describes their particular situation (ie. 0 = Not at all – 3 = Nearly Every Day). The PHQ-9 has been found to have excellent internal reliability with a coefficient alpha of 0.89 (Kroenke, Spitzer & Williams, 2001).
Design and Procedure
The survey provided to the respondents was a written questionnaire enlisting qualitative responses. The independent variable, immigrant status, had two levels, immigrant or non-immigrant. Our questionnaire lead to three dependent variables; GPA grouping variable, score on the PSS and the score on the PHQ-9.
Participants were instructed to read an informed consent opening to ensure that each of them understood the target population and operational definitions. The participants able to complete the survey were limited to undergraduate students so that we may see their current academic success as well as get a measure of mental health while experiencing the stressors of everyday college life. Immigrant status has been defined as having lived in the United States for less than 5 years. This number was chosen so that be it a freshman or a fifth year-man, the entirety of their college career would be spent in the United States. Once understood, the participants marked a box reading “Yes”, displaying their acknowledgement of their rights, definitions and respondent restrictions, and were instructed to proceed.
The survey was a The first seven questions were demographic questions, asking questions that may be categorized later in a possible attempt to find secondary results, should our data end up not displaying reliable or significant results. GPA was measured by grouping and assigning values to each group: Less than or equal to a 2.0 had the numerical value of 1, 2.01-2.5 was assigned the number 2 and so on, up until 3.51-4.0 which was given the number 5. The next ten questions were the Perceived Stress Scale questions in the exact order that Cohen had tested. Following the PSS were the nine questions making up the Public Health Questionnaire. Once the participant had finished the 27th question, they clicked submit and was thanked for their time.
Results
Participants were separated by immigrant or non-immigrant status and scored in three areas; GPA, Perceived Stress Scale and the Patient Health Questionnaire – 9. Beginning with academic success, we found that the average grouping score for the non-immigrants’ and immigrants’ GPAs were 3.34 and 4.2, respectively. We had to keep in mind that these averages were not the GPAs themselves but the 1-5 scoring range of the GPA grouping. After performing an Independent Sample T-test we found that there was a significant difference between the two groups in academic performance (p=.037). Both groups’ scores on the PSS and the PHQ-9 were found to be not significant. The PSS scores had p-value of .296 while the PHQ-9 had a p-value of .07.
In an attempt to find other meaningful results we ran the same T-test, with the same dependent variables, although this time comparing males and females. After determining the descriptive means and analyzing the data, none of the three dependent variables were found to be significant. That being said, the averages of GPA group numbers were 3.37 for the males and 3.4 for the females, further stressing the significance of the immigrants’ average of 4.3.
Discussion
This study looked to expand on prior research that dealt with the mental struggles of immigration and the academic work load given to college students. Researchers have found evidence that suggests that first generation immigrants earn better grades than those who are considered to be second or third generation (Duong, Liu, Schwartz & Mccarty, 2013) In this study we wanted to look at first generation immigrants who came to the United States for an undergraduate education and, rather than compare them to their own children years later, compare them to their current classmates. We aimed our study to expand the current research by combining both academic success and mental health in United States undergraduate students who have not yet had time to acculturate.
We hypothesized that those students that were classified as immigrants would have a higher GPA, indicating academic success, but that they would have higher levels of stress and depression. The results indicated that undergraduate immigrants in the United States are significantly more successful, academically, which confirms our own hypothesis and further strengthens the results of prior research. We also looked at the differences between males and females who took our survey and had no significant results, also as expected.
In terms of respondents, one participant who classified themselves as an immigrant, had to be removed from the data set because they were attending the Beijing University of Technology, rather than an undergraduate school in the United States. Had this participant been added to the study, the data would have ended up much differently. If this individual had been included, the immigrant/non-immigrant GPA would no longer have been significant but it would have made the immigrant/non-immigrant depression level difference significant. We found this interesting because it is just one participant but it would have changed the results of the survey so drastically. It is likely that this is because there were only 6 respondents who indicated that they were, in fact, immigrants and being forced to ignore one participant’s scores changes the averages more-so than ignoring 30-40 similar respondents.
There were many limitations to this study that are cause for pause when examining the results. Firstly, the extreme lack of participants identifying as one of the two levels of IV, immigrants, is disconcerting and calls the generalizability of the survey into question. This major limitation causes problems because only 5 immigrant undergraduate students is likely to not be the average of the entire immigrant undergraduate population. While the final data may not change with more participants, we cannot know and we should, therefore, look at the results of this study somewhat skeptically.
Secondly, with the vast majority of participants responding from the Virginia Military Institute, it is hardly a representation of average immigrant and non-immigrant undergraduate students. VMI is not only known for having a lower GPA than other universities but also for the, possibly, abnormally high stress levels. The Perceived Stress Scale has an average score, for all individuals, of 13 but the averages for the participants in our study was 18.4 (Lee, 2012). While this does not hurt the internal validity of our study, it does make it difficult to generalize and say that the 121 responses recorded are representative of normal college students. Again, maybe the average for college students is, in fact, around 18 but we cannot know based on our, primarily VMI based, study. On a similar note, many VMI cadets believe that they do not get enough sleep every night and, with that said, we find it curious that in many responses to the Patient Health Questionnaire, the majority of “depression” indicating points were answered in a insomnia/hypersomnia question. Without a more varied undergraduate school response rate, we cannot know whether the VMI responses are actually depressed or reporting their problematic, irregular sleep patterns.
As a result of these significant limitations on our study, we hesitate to generalize our results past our specific survey participants. In future studies we suggest that researchers gather sufficient undergraduate students identifying as both levels of independent variables and gather responses from a multitude of different universities, both, in order to increase external validity. Furthermore, in order to increase accuracy of academic success and have a more meaningful “average” GPA, we would advise that researchers ask for exact GPAs and not group them, as we did in this study. The averages, 3.34 and 4.2 are not actual GPAs and do not give any indication of where, within each .5 grouping, the students lie. Changing this surveying technique may have a very noticeable effect on the average for the two groups and may even change the significance.
In conclusion, while we did find a significant difference between responding immigrants’ and non-immigrants’ GPA all of our other results were found to be not significant. While the GPA is significant, we are unsure about the generalizability and will air on the side of caution when predicting or comparing with future results. As a result of our low external validity we would urge future researchers to read our own perceived limitations and attempt to make up for them in their own study.
Works Cited
Akiba, Daisuke. (2007). Ethnic Retention as a Predictor of Academic Success: Lessons from the Children of Immigrant Families and Black Children. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 80.5: 223-226.
Amer, Mona M. (2007). Muslim Immigrants–Diverse Community, Unique Mental Health Needs. PsycEXTRA Dataset PsycNet.
Duong, Mylien T., Freda F. Liu, David Schwartz, and Carolyn A. Mccarty. (2013). Generational Differences in Academic Achievement Among Immigrant Youth: A Meta-Analytic Review. PsycEXTRA Dataset.
Kroenke, Kurt, Robert L. Spitzer, and Janet B. W. Williams. (2001). The PHQ-9. Journal of General Internal Medicine 16.9: 606-613.
Lee, Eun-Hyun. (2012). Review of the Psychometric Evidence of the Perceived Stress Scale. Asian Nursing Research 6.4. 121-127.
Mui, A. C., and S.-Y. Kang. (2006). Acculturation Stress and Depression among Asian Immigrant Elders.” Social Work 51.3. 243-255.
Ramos-Sanchez, Lucila. (2011). Mental Health and Psychosocial Stressors of Documented and Undocumented Latino Immigrants. PsycEXTRA Dataset.
Subrebost, Kelly L., and Angela M. Desilva. (2007). What Is Really Important?: Educational Aspirations and Attainment of Haitian Immigrants. PsycEXTRA Dataset.
Tseng, Vivian. (2006). Unpacking Immigration in Youths’ Academic and Occupational Pathways. Child Development 77.5. 1434-1445.
Wong, D. F. K. (2004). The Impacts of Acculturative Stress and Social Competence on the Mental Health of Mainland Chinese Immigrant Youth in Hong Kong. British Journal of Social Work 34.7. 1009-1024.
Zajacova, Anna, Scott M. Lynch, and Thomas J. Espenshade. (2005). Self-Efficacy, Stress, and Academic Success in College. Research in Higher Education 46.6. 677-706.
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