Our Growing Research Team

Welcome everyone! The start of a new fall semester has also brought to the research a whole new talented group of individuals to the research team.  

Lynsey Weston is a third year doctoral student in the School Psychology program at UMCP. She received her B.A. in Psychology and English from Georgetown University in 2008, and previously worked in sales and marketing for a textbook publishing company. As a member of Dr. Colleen O’Neal’s Emotions, Equity, and Education research lab, Lynsey does research on how motivation, engagement, and perseverance can support academic success among economically disadvantaged students. As a school psychologist, Lynsey hopes to work with teachers, parents and students to improve the mental health, emotional well-being, and academic achievement of students suffering from poverty, trauma, and other obstacles to success.

Molly Morin is a first year doctoral student in the Student Affairs Program. She received a B.A. in Elementary Education and Sociology from the University of La Verne in 2008 and a M.Ed. in College Student Personnel from the University of Maryland College Park in 2010. She is from Southern California and most recently worked at Chapman University as an Academic Advisor and Program Director for their First-Generation College Student Support Program, the Promising Futures Program that she developed at Chapman. Her research interests currently include college access and retention for underrepresented students especially first-generation, Latina/o, and low-income students and factors contributing to their academic success. She is excited to join the research team and will be supporting the qualitative components of the study.

Annie Marie Goldthrite is currently a first year graduate student in the School Psychology program. She received a B.S. in Human Development from Cornell University in May 2014 and is interested in youth academic success, minority mental health, and at-risk youth development. She looks forward to helping with all steps of the research process (especially data analysis!) She's excited to be a part of the team and is looking forward to using this research to inform her practice as a future school psychologist. 

With this collective talent we hope to outreach and recruit more participants, analyze more quantitative surveys, and conduct and analyze more interviews. 
Amy Fuhrmann, M.S. is a Doctoral Student in the Counseling Psychology Department at the Univesity of Maryland. She is dedicated to research and practice that promotes psychological and physical well-being, especially among populations with invisible identities, such as those with health challenges. She aims to conduct research that informs intervention directly through the experiences of participants, thereby developing culturally sensitive and reality-based conclusions to inform theory, further research, and practice. 

Survey about Maryland Latina/o Students is LIVE!! Participate!!!

Survey Link HERE -->> http://tinyurl.com/l93mptl <<---

Please help us recruit first-generation Latina/o college students in the state of Maryland! We have launched the survey that is part of a study we are conducting on the impact of the Maryland DREAM Act on undocumented and Latina/o students. We hope results from this study can assist students, administrators, and community members in the state of Maryland who are serving and working with Latino students.

We ask that you please share our survey with individuals that are 

1. At least 18 years old;
2. Latina/o;
3. Have graduated high school or obtained a GED (not have graduated college); 
4. Are the first member of their family to attend college; and
5. Live in the State of Maryland 

In order to protect students, we are making every effort to ensure that the survey is confidential, anonymous, and voluntary.

Share the link with others in the state of Maryland who may work with undocumented and/or documented U.S.-born or naturalized Latina/o students who meet the criteria above. 

Thank you for encouraging others to participate. We really appreciate your support!

Sincerely,
Research Team

Questions? latinao.student.experiences@gmail.com

New Member of the Team: Ellie!

The research team is so delighted to have Ellie Howe as our expert survey guru. When we started talking about the move of the survey from paper to an on-line version we sought out an enthusiastic quantitative graduate student.  Ellie Howe joined the team in December of 2013, and is a Higher Education Student Affairs Masters candidate. She received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2013. As the Graduate Coordinator of Off Campus Student Life, she strives to be a resource for off campus students and create engaging programming. Her research interests include gender based violence, stereotype threat, and psychological implications of campus climate. Her research specialties are questionnaire development, item design, and respondent recruitment. As a future student affairs professional, Elliehopes to do meaningful work with students that is grounded in theory and research.

Thank you Ellie for making this research process a little bit easier! 

Campus Climate & Possible Impacts to Research Study

If you didn’t hear about it before, back in mid November 2013, there was a student group, the Young Conservatives of Texas, at the University of Texas-Austin that was going to do a mock immigration sting on campus to prompt a discussion about immigration reform.  At this same time, our research team was wondering how to reach out to undocumented aspiring college students and college students.  Even though this incident occurred in Texas, far from Maryland, such incidents make undocumented youth weary of getting involved with anything having to do with identifying themselves as “undocumented.” Talk about creating a campus or national climate of fear by simulating “catching an immigrant” and getting rewarded for it, like the event at UT was considering?!

To respond to this event, the UT campus community composed of students, staff and community leaders, put together an on-line petition to revoke the student group on campus and had a protest regarding the event.  Documented and undocumented students were empowered to take a stance against this event.  We are really living in a time when more and more students are “UNDOCUMENTED and UNAFRAID.”  Eventually, the YCT student group was pressured to cancel their event due to the public outcry, the UT-Austin's administration’s disapproval, and the rally. 

Courtesy of Nia Wesley
Source: http://egbertowillies.com/2013/11/19/young-conservatives-of-texas/ 

Although students in UT-Austin may be unafraid on their campus, this does not mean that Maryland students are the same. As a research team, we still have to be aware of the possible tenuous campus climate that can ensue if events like this would occur here.  To ensure the safety and confidentiality of our study participants, we will not collect full names of those students who are interested in being interviewed, and the survey itself does not ask for any identifying information. 

We hope that our study will provide some context of the campus experience of undocumented Latina/o students in the state of Maryland. 

Utilizing Qualtrics

As a part of our research, we are utilizing Qualtrics to develop a questionnaire. Qualtrics offers a solid, secure platform while still allowing us to customize. One of the features of Qualtrics that we have utilized the most is skip and display logic.

Skip logic allows the user to bump respondents to further points in the questionnaire, depending how they answer certain questions. For example, our study has specific participant requirements such as age, student status, and first generation status. If a respondent doesn't fit the criteria of our study, we are able to bump them to the end of the questionnaire. This ensures that we are truly studying the target population.

Display logic is another feature that we have utilized significantly. Display logic allows us to have certain questions generated depending on how respondents answer certain questions. For example, if a student answers that they were born in the US, it wouldn't make sense for them to answer our questions for undocumented students. Using display logic, we can hide those questions so that the respondent only answers questions relevant to them.

Utilizing Qualtrics has been greatly helpful in developing our questionnaire. The options for customization allow us to make sure our respondents are answering questions relevant to their experience. As we implement the survey, I know we are all looking forward to using the many features Qualtrics offers for data analysis. More on that to come!

DACA or MD DREAM Act, which to choose?

CASA De Maryland, Electronic Flier Event

When we began our outreach to the local community and connected with Casa De Maryland, we could not quite understand why students would rather choose using DACA as opposed to the Maryland DREAM Act (In-State Tuition) policy in order to gain the benefit of the lowest tuition rate in community college.  As a team we attended another event at Casa, the "Coming Out of the Shadows & Cultural Night,” in which the community organizers took the time to provide specific information about

CYC 10.30.13, Poster on Table "Our Stories"

the Maryland DREAM Act and the DACA program, as well as provide a platform in which a current community member could “come out of the shadows” by stating his immigration story and his undocumented status as “undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic.” The meeting-event was enlightening because as we spoke to currently undocumented students, who are either recent high school graduates or community college students, we were able to gain more clarity in these two policies. Most importantly, these community discussions illustrated for us how students use the formal policies to their advantage, and use the language in college/university admissions policies to gain in-state tuition.

Why do students use DACA as opposed to the MD DREAM Act? Answer…drum roll, please!  Some students do not qualify for the MD Dream Act; therefore they use the documentation they get from the DACA policy (Driver’s License, Social Security, Work Permit) as an example of being a resident of the State of Maryland and as evident of “documentation” that colleges and universities require of students if they want to be considered in-state residents.

CYC 10.30.13, Stand Up Poster "Access to Higher Education"

Next in our research process is an analysis of these two policies, as well as the community colleges and universities in our study to see how students are interpreting the policies to fit their needs.  Further research and analysis could also be done on the documents and primary sources we have collected from this and other community based organizations.  Included are some of those documents.

CYC 10.30.13, Stand Up Poster "DACA" 

                                                                                                                                                 

A breakthrough in contextual understandings, like policy interpretation of our participants, is always rewarding. Thank you to those students who were willing to share their experience in navigating the legal and policy arenas of community colleges and universities.  

Illegality Conference Aligns to Study Concepts

Harvard University Campus

The Illegality, Youth, and Belonging Conference that happened in Harvard Graduate School of Education, October 25-26, 2013, in which over 100 scholars, community advocates, and college students attended, addressed many of the concepts we are addressing in our study.  Concepts like young adults’ sense of belonging, psychosocial needs, and the impact of immigration policies on the family structure were discussed.  The most exciting aspect of the conference was meeting some of the leading authors of the field of immigration history, illegality, and community activism that have and will continue to move the comprehensive immigration reform forward. Some of the research that was presented claimed that Mexican-origin young adults (ages 20-25) identified as their primary sense of belonging in his/her legal status, and not necessarily feeling a sense of belonging through educational, economic, social, or political participation in community.  These secondary was of feeling a sense of belonging are then used to claim legal citizenship (Enriquez).

Additionally, leading scholar Abrego and researchers Del Real, claimed that immigrant youth are experiencing psychological stressors, like guilt, anxiety, and constant fear, due to their lack of citizenship status or because they belong to a mixed-status family.  Abrego further stated that U.S. citizens in mixed families feel the effect of the unintended consequences of family members who are undocumented as well, and as a result illegality affects the entire family structure. Del Real, found that college students’ perpetuation and accumulation of acute and chronic stigma create stressful experiences. In her study she did find that students exhibited resilient coping mechanisms, and institutional agents, like college educators and staff, were able to provide information about scholarships and other resources.

Harvard University Campus

Well-known scholars, like Leo Chavez and Robert Smith, were able to frame the discussion of the current rhetoric of immigration reform, as well as discuss the influence of this policy on the motivation of young adults from aspiring to attend higher education. Smith’s longitudinal study of now full adults, over 30 years old, found that these individuals were not interested in pursuing college even though they may be able to because of the current DACA program. These adults feel defeated, and some cannot afford college due to other life circumstances that were related to their previous undocumented status.

We look forward to the publication of all of these scholars’ research in the coming year, and hope that this research will inform and add to our study.

Presentations sources at the Illegality, Youth, and Belonging Harvard University Conference, October 25-26, 2013.

Abrego, Leisy J., University of California-Los Angeles. “Out of Place and Disengaged: Illegality's Consequences on Citizens in El Salvador and the United States.”

Chavez, Leo R., University of California-Irvine. “The Legacy of Illegality: Living Outside/Inside the Law and the Children of Immigrants in the Greater Los Angeles Area.”

Del Real, Deisy, University of California-Los Angeles. “They See Us Like Trash” The Impact of Anti-immigrant Stigma Stress on the Psychological Well-being of Unauthorized Mexican Young Adults.”

Enriquez, Laura E. University of California-Los Angeles.  “I Fit In [But] I Don’t Know If I Belong”: Undocumented Mexican-Origin Young Adults Navigating Belonging and Citizenship in the U.S."

Smith, Robert C. Baruch College and the Graduate Center-City University of New York, “Natural Experiments in American Immigration: Undocumented and Documented Children of Immigrants Long Term Mobility.”