Collaborative Research: Stress, Academic Outcomes, and Health Outcomes among Language Brokers

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In US communities where many people speak a second language, children often serve as translators and intermediaries for their English-limited parents. In this way, these children serve as "language brokers" for adults. However, the cognitive and social challenges accompanying these responsibilities place substantial burdens on these children, imposing distinctive psychological demands and stresses. The proposed research will investigate how serving in this role results in costs and benefits to adolescent language brokers. Using a comprehensive measurement strategy involving surveys, daily assessments, and physiological measures, this project will focus on underlying mechanisms to reveal how a unique stressor contributes to academic and health outcomes as adolescents develop during the transition from middle school to high school. Given the large numbers of families in the US with English-limited parents, the insights generated by this project can be expected to benefit broad swaths of society. The project also trains undergraduate and graduate students who have been traditionally under-represented in the sciences, and trains educators who will be able to use the research results in ways that will yield the greatest impact. The investigators will examine multiple aspects of the subjective and objective experiences of language brokers, and will identify profiles (or patterns) of language-brokering experiences. An important aspect of the project will be the effort to establish how these profiles change over developmental time. These profiles will include information about subjective experiences such as sense of efficacy, benefits, and negative feelings, and the impact of these experiences on parent-child relationships and adolescents' academic, health, and psychosocial outcomes. The investigators will also link psychological stress, as measured by cortisol, to language brokering experiences, in order to understand the daily, acute, and chronic effects of these experiences. Daily reports of the various places where language brokering occurred and different types of items translated will be tested for links to daily cortisol awakening response and diurnal cortisol slopes. Adolescents' acute cortisol reactivity and recovery will be tested for differential responses as a function of language brokering experiences. For example, the investigators will test whether acute cortisol reactivity is steeper and recovery faster for those adolescents who feel more efficacious about language brokering, whereas acute cortisol reactivity is less steep and recovery slower for those adolescents who feel more negative about language brokering. Finally, the investigators will determine how adolescents' personal attributes (e.g., sense of resilience), language brokering context (e.g., translating in public versus private contexts or translating more complex versus simpler documents), and cultural factors (e.g., a sense of familism) may alter the effects of language brokering on individuals' outcomes. This project will shed light on the ways in which language brokering positively and negatively influences adjustment among children of English-limited parents.