published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

In the postwar period Swedish communities have become more multicultural. Although there are about 120,000 Finnish immigrant children below the age of 18 in Sweden, knowledge about their dental health is rather sparse. Dental health and related factors were studied in Finnish immigrant children aged 5,8 and 14 years, living in the city of Luleå, northern Sweden. The effect of early dental health education to parents at the Child Health Centres was studied in one age group in Luleå and in one in the municipality of Botkyrka, Stockholm county. All groups of Finnish children were compared to Swedish children matched for age, sex and social class. At the age of 5 the prevalence of dental caries was higher than in Swedish control children. At the age of 8, this difference persisted, but was less pronounced in the permanent than in the primary dentition. The net mean caries increment between 5 and 8 years of age was 11.2 in the Finnish group compared to 7.4 in the Swedish. The proportion of children selected for individual prophylaxis and the time used between age 5 and 8 did not differ between the Finnish and the Swedish groups. In the Finnish teenagers, the prevalence of dental caries was higher than in the Swedish teenagers. Periodontal health was equally good in all age groups of Finnish and Swedish children. The difference in caries prevalence between the two groups was mainly explained by a more frequent between-meal eating and a higher intake of sucrose-containing products between meals in the Finnish children. Even though they had been included in organized dental care with individual prophylaxis, this was obviously not enough to guarantee them as good a dental health as in the Swedish children. Flourides were used to an equal extent in the Finnish and Swedish groups. Toothbrushing was less frequent in all Finnish age groups than in the Swedish controls. The Finnish parents were less convinced than the Swedish about their ability to influence the child’s dental health, and more Finnish than Swedish parents also found it necessary to visit a dentist only when they had toothache. The Finnish teenagers who had received almost twice as many hours of individual prophylaxis as the Swedish, knew less about the etiology of dental caries but equally much about the etiology of gingivitis. The best result of early dental health education to parents, evaluated by comparing prevalence of dental caries of the children at the age of 3, was obtained when information was given three times in Finnish. If information in the mother tongue cannot be offered, an extra session of information in Swedish can also benefit the dental health of the child. / <p>S. 1-42: sammanfattning, s. 43-115: 5 uppsatser</p> / digitalisering@umu

Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 25, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 358-389).

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays on childhood disadvantage and its consequences in Sweden. A Longitudinal Look at Child Poverty Using Both Monetary and Non-monetary Approaches. In this paper, we broaden the analysis of child poverty by using both monetary and non-monetary measures of poverty and by comparing these over time. We use a composite of questionnaire answers from children regarding possession of socially perceived necessities and participation in social activities to develop two non-monetary child-centric concepts of disadvantage: material deprivation and social exclusion. The empirical analysis is based on two cross-sections and a panel of children in the Swedish Level-of-Living Survey matched with parental survey data and administrative income records. Consistent with previous findings, we find that relative income poverty among children increases significantly between the year 2000 and 2010. The fraction of children that is disadvantaged in two dimensions, monetary and non-monetary, is relatively small (0.9–7.0 percent) but increases significantly during the period of study. The modest size of the overlap suggests that our measures capture different dimensions of disadvantage, thereby pointing to the importance of alternative poverty indicators. We also find that income status in childhood is the best predictor of socio-economic outcomes in young adulthood. The Aspirations-attainment Paradox of Immigrant Children: A Social Networks Approach. Using two independent and nationally representative samples of Swedish children, I compare the university aspirations and expectations between children of immigrants and children of natives. In line with existing findings, I find that children with foreign-born parents have significantly higher aspirations and expectations than their native-majority peers with and without conditioning on school performance, academic potential and friendship networks. I do not find any evidence of a significant immigrant-non-immigrant aspirations-expectations gap; immigrant children's aspirations and expectations are not less aligned than those of their native-majority peers. This result suggests that immigrant-native disparities in school outcomes are not driven by an aspirations-expectations gap. Finally, the results reveal significant gender differences. Native-majority girls with academic potential are, for example, more likely to express an aspirations-expectations gap. Moreover, having only female friends makes one less likely to belong to the aforementioned category. The Key Player in Disruptive Behavior: Whom Should We Target to Improve the Classroom Learning Environment? In this paper, I address the question: Who is the individual that exerts the greatest negative influence on the classroom learning environment? To answer this question, I invoke the key player model from network economics and use self-reported friendship data in order to solve the methodological problems associated with identifying and estimating peer effects. I overcome the issue of endogenous group formation by using the control function approach where I simultaneously estimate network formation and outcomes. The results show that the typical key player scores well on language and cognitive ability tests and is not more likely to be a boy than a girl. I also find evidence that removing the key player has a significantly larger effect on aggregate disruptiveness in a network than removing the most disruptive individual, implying that policy aimed at the most active individual could be inadequate.

Despite calls by U.S. researchers and policymakers for more teachers of color, supported by research documenting the significant social, emotional, and academic benefits of having same-race and same-ethnicity teachers, teaching remains an overwhelmingly White profession, even in light of demographic shifts rendering children of color the numeric majority in U.S. pre/schools. Relatedly, even as over one-fourth of children in the U.S. are immigrants, immigrant and transmigrant teachers have been marginalized in teacher education. Seeking to address this problem from a political-ideological paradigmatic perspective, this study sought to learn from transmigrant teachers’ negotiations of identities and practices. Rejecting essentialized notions of immigrant teachers/communities and focusing on Chinese transmigrant teachers teaching Chinese immigrants and children of immigrants, it sought to understand how they negotiated their teacher identities and pedagogical practices in light of occupational, geographical, and migrational intersections of identities and experiences. Further, it sought to document how these were enacted in early childhood public school classrooms. Situated in New York City, home to the largest Chinese and Chinese-American population of any city outside Asia, this collective case study centered the voices, identities, and experiences of three Chinese transmigrant early childhood teachers via Thirdspace theory, bridging identity, and transnational funds of knowledge. Doing so accounted for their individuality and collectivity. Analytically, • Thirdspace theory was used to map how they reconciled transnational identities, experiences, and pedagogical practices in the classroom; • bridging identity helped deepen understandings of how they constructed a professional/occupational identity influenced by, but not limited to, past biographical experiences; and • transnational funds of knowledge epitomized their lived experiences resulting from transnational navigations and/or belonging to transnational communities, capturing the complex flow of knowledges that characterized their experiences and pedagogies. Findings shed light onto the power and potential of Chinese transmigrant early childhood teachers in the education of Chinese immigrant children. Implications underscore the need for teacher education to learn from the experiences of international teacher candidates, recognizing how they may serve as role models for all students while improving the outcomes and school experiences of immigrant students, leveraging the simultaneity of experiences, identities, and experiences in the construction of Thirdspace classrooms.

Thesis advisor: Thomas M. Crea / Thesis advisor: Ruth E. Prado P. / Undocumented Mexican immigrants and their children make up a considerable proportion of the United States population at risk of mental health problems. Yet research to inform the mental health of undocumented Mexican immigrants and their children is very limited, and the majority of existing studies are qualitative; both types of studies are needed to understand better the relationship among different factors that may influence the mental health of immigrant parents and their children. This three-paper dissertation analyzed the implications of parents’ and children’s immigration status for the mothers' mental health and the children’s behavioral problems. It utilized subsamples from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A. FANS), a survey representative of Los Angeles County, which includes direct measures of respondent’s immigration status. Paper 1 used path analysis to examine the relationship between the mothers' immigration status and major depression, and whether self-efficacy served as a mediator. Surprisingly, undocumented mothers had fewer symptoms of major depression compared with Mexican American and documented mothers. However, when self-efficacy mediated the relationship, immigration status lowered self-efficacy, increasing symptoms of major depression. Paper 2 used hierarchical regression analysis to examine the associations of mother’s and children’s immigration status with children’s behavioral problems. Immigration status was significantly associated with internalizing problems, but not with externalizing problems. For children in mixed-status families, the influence of immigration status on internalizing problems was more severe for children in middle childhood compared to children in early childhood. The influence of immigration status on internalizing problems was more severe for adolescents compared to children in early childhood and middle childhood. Also, the mother’s self-efficacy ameliorated the negative influence of immigration status on children’s behavioral problems (internalizing and externalizing) for girls in undocumented and mixed-status families. Finally, marital conflict exacerbated the negative effects of immigration status on children’s behavioral problems (internalizing and externalizing) for girls in undocumented and mixed-status families. Paper 3 utilized path analysis to examine the mediating role of mother’s mental health (e.g., major depression and self-efficacy) and parenting stress in the relationship between immigration status and children’s behavioral problems. It was found that immigration status influences the mothers' mental health and parenting stress, which in turn influences the behavioral functioning of children in middle childhood and adolescents. Results of these three studies will help inform practice and policy by addressing critical gaps in the literature impacting a growing number of undocumented immigrant mothers and their children. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

“Undocumented Youth” is a socio-legal history of Latinx child migration to and within the United States between 1937 and 1986. By drawing on archival collections from across the country, the dissertation analyzes a crucial missing dimension of Mexican and Central American (im)migration history that adult-centric histories have overlooked or obscured. The dissertation uncovers a legal system of migrant exclusion that relied on various legal and quasi-legal forms of domestic restrictions and removal that combined with federal policies governing international migration. Under this broad legal apparatus, “border crossing” included migration from Mexico into the U.S. and domestic migration across state lines. Federal and state officials denied ethnic-Mexican border-crossing youth, with and without U.S. citizenship, legal rights and access to welfare state benefits, especially public education. This hybrid system of restriction and removal resulted in multiple injuries to children and families, including migrant minors’ exploitation on farms, educational deprivation, detention, and deportation beginning in the 1940s. The broad racialization of the criminal and invading “alien” of all ages at mid-century spurred ambivalent legal and political responses from officials in power that ranged from humanitarian to punitive. As grassroots activists and sympathetic policymakers found ways to intervene on behalf of unaccompanied and accompanied ethnic-Mexican migrant children, the state persistently and creatively enacted new draconian measures and refashioned well-meaning polices to reinforce the power and reach of the domestic removal apparatus. In response to the rights deprivations and welfare state exclusion imposed on the nation’s migrant Mexican youth, child welfare and migrants’ rights activists devised a series of local welfare programs in the 1940s and ‘50s to restore border-crossing minors’ “right to childhood” based on middle-class norms of innocence, play, and education. These local efforts led ultimately to federal reform, specifically the establishment of the Migrant Education Program (MEP) in 1965 during the War on Poverty. However, the MEP’s introduction of a unique data collection technology in schools jeopardized the privacy of undocumented youth and their parents, making them vulnerable to the criminal justice system and federal immigration enforcement. This data collection helped transform public schools into school-to-deportation pipelines. Concurrently, undocumented Mexican and Central American youth were forced to endure different forms of educational deprivation and rights violations in carceral and quasi-carceral sites, in immigrant detention and on commercial farms. The tensions and contestations over rights provoked by child migrants with and without U.S. citizenship after 1937 led to legal experiments, liberal pro-migrant federal policies like the MEP, and landmark court decisions, such as Plyler v. Doe (1982), that provided the rhetorical and policy foundations necessary to construct modern, child-centered mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. These legal experiments and court battles also increasingly defined national U.S. citizenship as the sole grounds for claiming rights, eclipsing social and local citizenship as modes of belonging. As a result, they hardened the distinctions between the citizen and the noncitizen migrant. In the 1970s, a legal regime with strict noncitizen restrictions emerged that no longer collapsed all border-crossing minors into a single discursive and legal category. By the late-twentieth century only minors and adults without federal U.S. citizenship were identified and marginalized as “migrants,” marking a sharp departure from the category’s previous legal and social meanings.

Guided by the importance of children's voices and perspectives, this study aims at finding the immigrant children's perspectives of books that share stories of early school experiences of immigrant children. Before working with children, there was a careful selection process and analyzing of the three picture books chosen for the study using critical content analysis and childism lenses. The participants are three Arab immigrant children at the age of 6 who are bilingual and attended school in the U.S for one year, at least. With acknowledgement to reader-response theory, the data collection process started with an introductory home visit, followed by three individual interactive read-aloud sessions using interviews, audio records, and observations. The data collection involved field notes of non-verbal responses of the participants and these notes supported analysis of the eight transcripts. Thematic analysis is used in analyzing the data of each story, followed by identifying finding themes across all three stories. The seven themes found across all three stories are discussed in the final chapter and include: Children can have empathy for characters, understand social injustices in the stories, be agents to change injustice in the stories, and are curious about different cultures. The children's personal stories shared during this research are the most valuable outcome because they reflect the real experiences of those most affected by the research topic. The study also explains how listening to immigrant children's personal stories is an act that supports justice and helps to fight against any kind of prejudice those children might face. The study emphasizes that children have the ability to engage in sophisticated conversations about themselves and their life experiences through the use of appropriate tools combined with believing in the children's rights.