Mexican-American Sociocultural Variability and Persistence in a Community College
| dc.contributor.author | Cordova, Mario Roberto | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2019-06-10T22:46:35Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2019-06-10T22:46:35Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 1994-12 | |
| dc.description | 379 pages | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | The purpose of this study was to understand how Mexican-American community college students achieved academically in relation to their sociocultural variabilities. The project extended Tinto's model of persistence. My impetus was the nearly universal practice by empiricists to quantify persistence and to leave unoperationalized Mexican-American ethnicity. These tendencies have left us with decontextualized understandings of students' background variables-- sociocultural variabilities--and their interactions with college academic and social structures. To address these conceptual and methodological shortcomings, I engaged twelve Mexican-American vocational and transfer students in case study research. I based my research design on the premise that persistence in terms of sociocultural variabilities is also an ethnopsychological study of levels and types of acculturation and that acculturation implies cross-cultural conflict in people's quests toward structural integration. Ethnomethodological and symbolic interaction perspectives helped me understand the ethnopsychological and cross-cultural conflict dimensions of persistence. I obtained preliminary information of students' acculturative types by administering the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican-Americans (ARSMA). Thereafter, and based upon answers to questions from my interview guide and from participant and nonparticipant observation activities, I triangulated the data to establish student acculturative types. I open-coded data throughout the study, analyzed, and collapsed data from interviews with students and college staff to find emergent themes. Sociocultural variability did seem to affect persistence more for first-generation students in terms of academic integration. Otherwise, persistence for all students was attributable to: (1) oppositional culture orientations to dominant American culture in the face of intergenerational racial and gender discrimination; (2) the importance of the Mexican-American family as a mediating influence of schoolings; (3) strong initial commitments to college; very low socioeconomic backgrounds; (4) Mexican-American ethnic affiliation and loyalty enhanced social integration; (5) encouragement by faculty and counselors facilitated students' goal attainments; and (6) informal contact with faculty facilitated social and academic integrations. Implications addressed the need for culturally relational models of engagement within and outside the classroom, and student-centered models of goal attainment. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/24594 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US | en_US |
| dc.title | Mexican-American Sociocultural Variability and Persistence in a Community College | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis / Dissertation | en_US |