Psychology Commons^™

When Two Roads Diverge: How Language Barriers Undermine Immigrant Parental Authority

Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

In the United States, immigrant families are one of the fastest growing and most diverse segments of the population (Zhou,1997). Researchers have studied many facets of the immigration process that these families go through, such as acculturation gaps (Weisskirch & Alva, 2002), ethnic identity (Hurtado & Gurin, 1987), youth violence (Boutakidis, Guerra, & Soriano, 2006), and parenting styles (Nguyen, 2008). One construct that surfaces often in these studies is immigrant parental authority; some researchers hypothesize that the immigration experience could shift the authority structure in immigrant homes. The purpose of this literature review is to examine language barriers between immigrant …