Resultados (Mapa de peligros por lahares secundarios)

The current paper investigated the associations between assimilation measures and delinquent risk factors for immigrant youth. Compared to the extant studies, the current paper demonstrated the following differences. First, this study focused on three delinquent-risk factors rather than measures of delinquent behavior as the outcome variables. Second, all the four different assimilation measures—including immigrant status, linguistic assimilation, generation status, and the linguistic assimilation gap between youth and parents—were used as the explanatory variables. Third, this paper compared estimates from logistic regressions and doubly robust (DR) methods to explore the associations.

The current study does not address any causal relationship between assimilation and delinquent risk factors. The logistic regression design is naturally an exploratory design. Although the propensity-score modeling in the DR estimation method can help address problems of endogenity issues such as selection bias, it cannot fully solve the problems because the propensity-score modeling cannot control for unobserved variables. Therefore, the result should be interpreted only as associations between variables. Even when an assimilation level is associated with a delinquent risk factor, it does not

necessarily mean that the assimilation level causes the delinquent risk factor development. In summary, the logistic regression and DR estimation results are partially

supportive of the positive association between assimilation levels and likelihoods of delinquent risk development. Across all the assimilation measures and all the estimation methods, a low level of assimilation tended to be associated with a high level of

47

attachment to family and school for immigrant youth. However, the associations between assimilation levels and the delinquent peer fraternization outcome remained inconclusive because of the inconsistency in statistical significances. The delinquent-risk factor of positive attitudes toward delinquency had no statistically significant association with any assimilation measure.

Among the four assimilation measures, the immigrant status seems to be a relatively strong predictor of the delinquent risk factor outcomes. In general, immigrant youth were more likely to avoid delinquent peers and to feel more attached to their family and school than their native-born counterparts. Meanwhile, the generation-status measure had no statistically significant association with any delinquent risk factor development. The two language-related assimilation measures had mixed results. The results for these assimilation measures had inconsistencies in statistical significances and magnitudes of coefficients. In particular, with the linguistic assimilation measure and the attachment outcome, the estimated odds ratio magnitudes shrunk dramatically in moving from the logistic regression to the DR estimation.

Several implications arise from the statistical results. One is that the four single- dimension assimilation measures, especially the language-related ones, may be relatively weak predictors of delinquent-risk factor development. The odds ratio magnitudes of these four measures were relatively small, ranging from 0.5 to 2.0, with the majority being just around 1.0. In particular, the linguistic assimilation measure seems to be less effective in predicting delinquent risk factors outcomes than most extant studies argue. It meshes with Morenoff and Astor's (2006) report that their linguistic assimilation measure

48

was not as strong a predictor of crime outcomes as other measures, such as the age when immigrants arrived in the U.S.

One possible explanation for this weakness of the current assimilation measures is that their construct validities are low due to their single dimensions. Assimilation is a total transition process of an immigrant's internalized cognitive and behavioral systems, including thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes (Finch et al., 2000; Vega and Gil, 1998). Those internal cognitive and behavioral changes for immigrant youth may be too complicated to be captured by quantitative measures (MacDonald and Saunders, 2012). In that sense, composite measures that gauge multiple dimensions of assimilation may be more useful in predicting delinquent risk factors than single-dimension measures.

However, it is worth noting that the current study results are consistent with the "Hispanic Paradox" or "Latino Paradox" (Palloni and Arias, 2004; Sampson, 2006 and 2008; Scribner, 1996). And while the study is an exploratory design, the results do not lend any support to the idea that immigrant youth are associated with more negative outcomes. Rather, the results suggest, if any, that less-assimilated immigrant youth tend to be associated with less delinquent risk.

Another implication of this study is that positive attitudes toward delinquency had no statistically significant association with any of the assimilation measures, which is against what the segmented assimilation theory expects. Assuming that subcultural deviant norms can be represented by the positive attitudes toward delinquency in the current study, the results indicate that even highly assimilated youth do not necessarily

49

absorb the subcultural deviant norms (see Alba and Nee, 1997; Perlmann and Waldinger, 1997 for the similar argument).

There exist a number of limitations in the current paper. One is still the

missingness, related to the willingness to report. Although the missing data analysis in Section 5 was based on the strong assumption that the missingness in the current data set occurred "at random," thus being predictable from other variables, there is still the possibility that the missingness might have occurred "not at random," depending solely on the unobserved own nature of the predictors and being unpredictable from other variables (Gelman and Hill, 2007). For example, it might be that immigrant youth who were less assimilated had a low level of willingness to report their low level of

assimilation. If this is the case, the current statistical inference only with the complete sample cases might be biased, being different from what could have been obtained when there was no missing value.

Also, because the majority of immigrant samples were Hispanic and most of them lived in specific inner city enclaves in Los Angles, the generalizability of the current study results is limited (Bersani, Loughran, and Piquero, 2013). Hispanic immigrants who newly migrated to their ethnic enclaves such as Los Angeles could expect some help from their ethnic neighbors, and the strong ethnic connection to the existing community would provide some protections for new immigrants, such as informal social controls or an economic opportunity. However, the results may not hold for immigrants who are following the recent trend of settling into new rural destinations where ethnic enclaves do not currently exist (Johnson and Lichter, 2008).

50

In addition, the data used for the current paper were cross-sectional, leaving most unobservable confounding factors uncontrolled in the regression modeling. Using self- reported data is another source of potential bias in the results, such as exaggeration and intentionally not answering particular questions.

Nevertheless, this paper has some noticeable strength. It empirically addressed the association between multiple assimilation measures, delinquent-risk factors, with a rare set of data that have language-based assimilation measures for both parents and youth from immigrant households. Also, this is the first study that has attempted to address associations between assimilation and delinquent-risk factors using a propensity core method called the DR method.

51

APPENDIX 1-A. Survey Question Item Statements