Escenarios en la aplicación del Modelo EFQM de Excelencia

In spite of limitations, this thesis has major strengths. Even though the sample is not nationally representative, findings suggest that non-Western immigrant preadolescents in multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods in Norway have higher odds of reporting emotional distress. This is because non-participants tend to exclude the most distressed participants, who have a higher likelihood of neither attending school during data collection nor delivering consent forms to parents and teachers.

In addition, this study’s findings indicate that the silent burden of emotional problems may already be more prominent in preadolescence among children of non-Western immigrants in urban multi-ethnic schools. The present results and analyses lead us to suggest that future studies should be made to investigate possible mechanisms implicated in this overrepresentation of children of immigrants among the emotionally distressed. Meanwhile, parents, teachers and others who work with preadolescents should be involved in formulating hypotheses about possible mechanisms to why preadolescents in Norway, with as different immigrant background as Pakistan, Turkey and Sri Lanka, appear to have such a similar profile of emotional problems and related risk factors. Also, parents, teachers, and health workers who routinely interact with preadolescents, should remain attentive in order to recognize problems and contact health care providers.

When comparing the magnitude of immigrant and non-immigrant odd ratios for belonging to the Distressed class, as compared to the Healthy class, the clinical relevance of this study is substantial. The results also replicates previous findings during adolescence

showing a gender gap in emotional problems, which sometimes emerge as early as preadolescence, as suggested for non-immigrants in this study. The explanatory effect of immigrant background on emotional symptoms was only 3%, which is small. Yet, small effects in social research are expected, and yet can have important implications (MacCallum et al., 2002). Rather than dismissing small effects, researchers should compare the relative size of effects (McCartney & Rosenthal, 2000). Following this line of thought the explanatory effect of immigrant background can be compared to that of gender, which is considered an important variable in the investigation of emotional problems. Yet gender accounted for 1% of the variance. In comparison, school hassles accounted for 12% of the variance in emotional problems in Paper I.

Findings suggest that the gender gap in emotional problems may be delayed among preadolescents with immigrant background in specific contexts. While the difficulties of recruiting immigrants are well-known in mental health research (Knight, Roosa, & Umaña- Taylor, 2009), this thesis is based on a moderate-sized sample of which 47 % had immigrant background. Even though the size of specific immigrant groups was below optimum, findings for the three largest immigrant groups were covered. It is imperative that mental health research rooms diversity, which includes immigrant groups who comprise a growing segment of the world’s population. Researchers studying minorities face additional challenges compared to peers who do not study a specific population. These include recruitment issues such as translation fees, persuading immigrant parents to participate in mental health surveys, as well as the potential stigma of ethnic group-specific findings (Knight et al., 2009). These challenges certainly add difficulty to attaining knowledge about the mental health of immigrants, but surely do not alter the importance of including these groups in mental health research.

Another important strength of the thesis, is that a series of background and potentially confounding factors were systematically controlled, minimizing unintended effects on associations. By controlling for other variables that could confound the associations in the model (such as economic hardship, gender and grade level), the unique information about the central relationships in question was maintained in this work. Many studies do not control for these variables, which leads to important information being lost. The size of the sample enabled that a number of potentially confounding background and academic factors were controlled, and therefore, provides robustness for the present findings. Thus, the effects in this thesis are mainly small, but significant and robust (McCartney & Rosenthal, 2000). Lastly, this thesis bridges the findings between national Norwegian reports and the international

research community which can now refine or refute the present findings. In view of lacking research in the field, this work converges and supports the call for further research on the relationship between parental achievement values and emotional problems in adolescents, especially in groups in which comparison is commonplace.

In spite of the sole reliance on one type of source being a limitation, the thesis is based on the type of source which may appear be the most reliable to obtain information about preadolescents’ emotional problems: self-reports (McCartney & Rosenthal, 2000). There are indications that self-reports by preadolescents on their emotional problems are more accurate than reports by both parents and teachers (Heiervang et al., 2008b; Van Roy et al., 2008). According to preadolescent self-reports, immigrant parents display higher levels of achievement values than non-immigrant parents. This appears to be positive given that earlier studies have linked positive parental achievement values to academic success in adolescence (Jeynes, 2007; Sheldon & Epstein, 2005). Research shows that immigrant children may benefit from positive parental academic involvement (Hill & Tyson, 2009; Kao & Tienda, 1995), although this beneficial effect may only apply in the absence of parental pressure such as comparison (and other unknown variables that were not investigated in this study). However, according to preadolescent self-reports, immigrant parents also display higher levels of comparison, which is directly related to emotional problems in this thesis, and indirectly related through pressure in other studies. Until further studies are conducted, parents in general, especially parents of preadolescents who appear to be emotionally distressed, may do well in substituting comparison with other strategies to encourage their children’s school achievement.