The hope of immigrant optimism

Sofía Bahena, Harvard University. Graduate School of Education

Immigrant optimism has been hypothesized to explain the academic resilience of children of immigrants in the face of adversity. Moreover, in much the same way as immigrant optimism has correlated to academic success, psychologists have also found hope to be highly predictive of academic performance. Given these findings in two separate strands of research, what, then, can education leaders and researchers learn from the immigrant experience in order to better support the academic wellbeing of Latino students writ large? This dissertation is comprised of two studies that aim towards first establishing the measurement properties of an instrument used to quantify hope, the Children's Hope Scale, among a Latino sample and then use this measure to examine a more substantive question of hope's relationship with academic outcomes and immigrant generation. Both studies use survey data from a...