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Parental Influence on Children during Educational Television Viewing in Immigrant Families

Yuting Zhaoa,b,* and Beth M. Phillipsa,b aDepartment of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL USA bFlorida Center for Reading Research, Tallahassee, FL USA

It has been suggested by researchers that educational television programmes may support the language and literacy development for children, especially those in immigrant families. In an immigrant family, many family characteristics appear to be related to educa- tional television programme viewing of children at home, for exam- ple, parental acculturation (the process of adapting to the new culture) and parentalmediation (supervision and guidance) of televi- sion viewing. In the present work, the parental influence on children during educational television viewing was studied quantitatively, based on a sample (n=171) of immigrant families with children aged 3–6years collected across the U.S. The results have revealed that significant differences existed between Asian and Hispanic groups in coviewingmediation and in their children’s educational television viewing. Furthermore, language in parental acculturation signifi- cantly predicted instructive and restrictive parental mediation, and parental occupation significantly predicted language in parental acculturation. This study initiates the attention to the topic of educa- tional television viewing in immigrant families, which warrants further investigations in the future as the Asian and Hispanic immi- grant population increases rapidly in the U.S. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Key words: parental influence; educational television; immigrant family; parental mediation; parental acculturation

The period frombirth to 6years old for a child is themost critical and intensive one in terms of developing language, as the brain continues growing. Language develop- ment, which occurs during this period, is fundamental for children to be successful in modern society (Hoff, 2005). As importantly, emergent literacy development, as

*Correspondence to: Yuting Zhao, Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems, Florida State University, 3210 Stone Building, 1114 West Call Street, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Infant and Child Development Inf. Child. Dev. 22: 401–421 (2013) Published online 29 May 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/icd.1798

a later outcome of language development, has been related to reading achievement in school (Storch & Whitehurst, 2001). This early childhood period is the best and most effective time for a child to acquire language and literacy skills, especially when immersed within a rich linguistic environment (Roberts, Jurgens, & Burchinal, 2005). However, some children from at-risk families (i.e. in poverty and with low parental education) are not as likely to be supported by their home environment (Hart & Risley, 1995; Neuman, 2006). A group that may be particularly at-risk includes children in immigrant families, who often face multiple risk factors associated with language learning. These factors are linked to the home literacy environment and, thus, ultimately to child outcomes (Storch & Whitehurst, 2001).These children, who enter school with limited basic literacy skills, may experience difficulties later in school (Phillips & Lonigan, 2009). In an attempt to improve the disadvantaged situ- ation of children in at-risk families, some researchers have found that educational television is likely to be an aid to the aforementioned issue (Uchikoshi, 2005, 2006). In the present work, we studied the family characteristics that could impact educa- tional television viewing of children in a sample of immigrant families potentially having at-risk backgrounds. Specifically, several key constructs, such as family socio-economic status (SES), educational television programme viewing, parental mediation of children’s viewing and parental acculturation have been investigated. Each of these is briefly addressed later.

Family SES, Home Literacy Environment and Immigration Status

A growing body of research indicates that SES is a complex and multi-aspect construct including family income, parents’ education and parental occupation (Phillips & Lonigan, 2005; Storch & Whitehurst, 2001). Family SES explained 42% of the variance in the rate of vocabulary growth of children at the age of 3 years (Hart & Risley, 1995). Low-SES status is a substantial disadvantage for children’s emergent literacy development (Storch & Whitehurst, 2001). One of the ways that family SES might affect child outcomes is through the home literacy environment (Storch & Whitehurst, 2001). The home literacy environment refers to literacy activities (e.g. shared reading, rhyming games and watching educational television) that parents utilized to develop children’s language skills(Burgess, Hecht, & Lonigan, 2002). Families from low-SES backgrounds are often less likely to provide a rich home literacy environment (Phillips & Lonigan, 2009).

In general, immigrant families often facemore hardship than native-born families, including crowded living conditions, food insecurity, poor health care and limited English proficiency (Dinan, 2006; Fix, Zimmermann, & Passel, 2001). However, there are some distinct family characteristics among different immigrant groups. According to the U.S. Census Current Population Reports (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009a), Asian American families had the highest mean annual income ($90 811), compared with Hispanic American families ($52 229), African American families ($46 046) and White families ($73 240). In terms of educational level, approximately 48.6% of Asian Americans had a college degree or higher, whereas only 11.8% of Hispanic Americans possessed a college degree or higher (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009b). In 2008, there were 1.4 million children aged 5–9years speaking a language other than English at home in the U.S. Recent surveys indicate that among these chil- dren, the largest group of children with spoken English difficulty is Hispanic/Latino children (22.9%), followed byAsian children (20.3%; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2010).

Given that family background characteristics conferring risk frequently occur at the same time, children in immigrant families are often less likely to be supported

402 Y. Zhao and B.M. Phillips

by their home literacy environment. Consistent with this premise, Farver, Eppe, and Ballon (2006) explored the home literacy environments of Latino children aged 4–5.5 years, and they found that several family characteristics were signifi- cantly related to the home literacy environment of Latino children, including family SES, parental literacy involvement, parents’ years in the U.S. and parental literacy habits.

Educational Television Programmes

Television has penetrated almost every aspect of family life since its invention. It was reported that 99% of the households (115.9 million) in the U.S. owned at least one television set in 2011 (Nielsen, 2011). A nationwide survey by Rideout and Hamel (2006) provided results that 99% of U.S. families with children 6 years or younger owned at least one television, and 43% of these children watched televi- sion for at least 2 hours in a typical day. Compared with other activities, such as reading books (40min), listening to music (48min) and playing video games (6min), watching television (59min) was the activity on which children 4–6 years spent the most time per day (Rideout & Hamel, 2006).

The current definition of educational television by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is ‘programming that furthers the educational and informational needs of children 16 years of age and under in any respect, including the child’s intel- lectual/cognitive or social/emotional needs’ (2006, p. 2). Previous research suggests that educational television programmes are different from general television programmes and that they may have distinct influences on children’s development (Anderson, Huston, Schmitt, Linebarger, & Wright, 2001; Jennings, Hooker, & Linebarger, 2009; Linebarger & Piotrowski, 2009). For example, most of the educa- tional television programmes on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) are research based (Jennings et al., 2009). The content seems not only to attract children to watch but also to support the language and literacy development of children (Jennings et al., 2009; Uchikoshi, 2006; Wright et al., 2001). The influence on literacy has been extensively studied regarding emergent literacy (Anderson et al., 2001; Linebarger & Piotrowski, 2009; Uchikoshi, 2005, 2006), vocabulary knowledge (Linebarger & Piotrowski, 2010; Wright et al., 2001) and motivation to read and write (Anderson et al., 2001; Wright et al., 2001). Many of these studies utilized experimental designs (Linebarger & Piotrowski, 2009; Uchikoshi, 2005, 2006), and thus, one may appropri- ately draw the conclusion from the empirical results that educational television can support the literacy development of children.

Given their educational characteristics, research-based educational television programmes may serve as an element of the home literacy environment. Family SES appears to relate to children’s educational television viewing, although the pre- vious literature on their relation was somewhat inconsistent. Some research studies suggested a positive relation (Huston, Wright, Marquis, & Green, 1999; Huston & Wright, 1997), whereas some failed to find the relation (Pinõn, Huston, & Wright, 1989). Phillips and Lonigan’s results (2009) indicated a negative relation between family SES (i.e. parental education and family income) and overall television viewing amount, as well as educational television programme viewing. These inconsistencies may arise because first, some studies (Huston et al., 1999; Huston & Wright, 1997) only asked about one specific educational television programme, Sesame Street. Second, one study (Pinõn et al., 1989) was conducted two decades ago, and the results may not be generalizable tomore recent family environments. There has been a substantial increase in the percentage of young children, particularly those from

Educational TV Viewing in Immigrant Families 403

middle and upper middle class households, attending preschools rather than being at home before attending kindergarten (U. S. Department of Commerce, 2010), and this may interact with the time allocated to television viewing such that the overall amount of television viewing by young children is simplymuch lower than previous in these families (Christakis & Garrison, 2009). In addition, the explosion of cable television and Internet-based media content available to families with more discretionary income might dilute the viewing time for free-access PBS stations that broadcast educational television. To further explore this topic, the present study was intended to offer additional insight into how family SES is related to children’s educational television viewing.

Parental Mediation

Most of the time, children watch television programmes at home with their parents; thus, inevitably, they are impacted by their parents’ decisions on the content and amount of television viewing. Parental mediation refers to just such parental supervision and guidance of children’s television viewing. A study by Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, and Marseille (1999) included telephone interviews with 519 Dutch parents whose children were aged 5–12years. They utilized varimax-rotated exploratory factor analysis to extract three factors (i.e. instructive, restrictive and coviewing) of parental mediation of television viewing. Instructive mediation is that parents not only know very well the content and the characters but also discuss these aspects with their children and guide them to think. Restrictive mediation refers to the restriction from parents on the amount, the times and the content of children’s viewing. Coviewing mediation is that parents are physically present to watch television programmes together with their children (not necessarily creating educational occasions). The studies of Warren (2003, 2005) also supported these three strategies of parental mediation through two surveys in the U.S. from 129 middle-income families (87% Caucasian) and 306 low-income families (69% African American and 18% Caucasian), respectively. Warren (2005) provided three models examined by path analyses for these three types of parental mediation and found that parental education was a significant predictor for parental mediation.

Atkin, Greenberg, and Baldwin (1991) earlier contextualized these three types of parental mediation of children’s television viewing (i.e. instructive, restrictive and coviewing mediation) within Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model (i.e. microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem). Bronfenbrenner (1979) emphasized the dynamics between a developing child and his or her environment. The microsystem is defined as bidirectional interactions and activities in a person’s immediate surroundings (Atkin et al., 1991). For instance, under the circumstances of children’s television viewing, parental involvement, children’s age and interpersonal interac- tions at home all belong to the bidirectional relationships in a domestic microsystem. Next, surrounding the microsystem is the mesosystem, which provides connections between microsystems to advance development. Exosystem refers to multiple social settings influencing the development of childrenwithout their direct participation. In this system, community life and family SES (i.e. parental education and income) seem to affect children’s television viewing. Macrosystem is the outmost level that consists of cultural consistencies. It is ‘various socioeconomic, ethnic, religious, and other sub-cultural groups, reflecting contrasting belief systems and lifestyles’ (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 26). In the present study, the ethnic cultures of different immigrant groups and parents’ different coping strategies in adapting to the new culture seem to serve as the macrosystem that may affect children’s

404 Y. Zhao and B.M. Phillips

television viewing (e.g. some Hispanic families’ values of educacion and familism and some Asian families’ value of collectivism, Bornstein & Cote, 2003; Reese, Balzano, Gallimore, & Goldenberg, 1995; Romero, Robinson, Haydel, Mendoza, & Killen, 2004).

Parental Acculturation

Parental acculturation is another variable that appears to affect children’s educational television programme viewing in immigrant families. Two models have described the phenomenon of acculturation. Gordon (1964) claimed that accultura- tion is the process by which a person is gradually absorbed into the host culture (linear or unidirectional models). However, the previous model was extended to be bidirectional and two-dimensional by Berry (1980); that is, people are able to acquire a new culture without necessarily losing their original one. During the process of parental acculturation (i.e. when parents in immigrant families adapt to the host culture), parents could employ acculturation strategies such as integration (selectively learning the new culture while maintaining the old one), assimilation (being totally absorbed into the new culture and not wanting to keep the old one), separation (separating themselves from the new culture) and marginalization (trying to have nothing to do with either the new culture or the old one; Sam, 2006). Portes and Rumbaut (2006) claimed that there was no particular acculturation pattern that fits all individuals or different immigrant groups. A number of applied studies, which have been conductedwith the guidance of the two acculturationmodels, led to some relevant findings concerning the various aspects of acculturation impacts. For example, integration and assimilation relate positively to school achievement (Eng et al., 2008), parenting (White, Roosa, Weaver, & Nair, 2009) and the home literacy environment (Farver et al., 2006).

In summary, the existing literature suggests that family characteristics are closely linked to the home literacy environment and, thus, ultimately to child outcomes. Given that many immigrant children often struggle without special help, their problems have the potential to increase. Because educational television programmes may support the development of future literacy skills (Anderson et al., 2001), and PBS can be accessed by most of these children, parents could help these children develop literacy skills in part via educational television viewing. Research also indi- cates that children’s programme viewing is affected by parental mediation, family SES and the general home literacy environment (Farver et al., 2006; Warren, 2003, 2005). As well, in immigrant families, parental acculturation appears to serve as the background construct that intertwines with family SES (Farver et al., 2006). There- fore, it is important to study parental acculturation and parental mediation behav- iours associatedwith children’s educational television viewing in a high-risk sample.

The objective of this studywas to investigate relations among family SES, parental mediation, parental acculturation and children’s educational television programme viewing in immigrant families, in particular within both Asian and Hispanic fami- lies. Previous literature indicated that there was a significant difference between Asian and Hispanic families regarding family income and parental education (U. S. Census Bureau, 2009a, 2009b). In addition, Asian and Hispanic immigrants are currently the largest two immigrant groups in the U.S. (Dinan, 2006). The following research questions were addressed: (RQ1) Is there a significant difference between the Asian and Hispanic children in the amount of viewing of educational television programmes? (RQ2) Is there a significant difference between the Asian and Hispanic children in the types of parental mediation of television viewing? (RQ3) Is there a

Educational TV Viewing in Immigrant Families 405

significant difference between the Asian and Hispanic children in parental accultur- ation patterns? (RQ4) Overall, what are the relations among parental education and occupation, parental acculturation, parental mediation of television viewing, and children’s amount of educational programme viewing? On the basis of the previous literature (e.g. Atkin et al., 1991; Warren, 2003, 2005; Valkenburg et al., 1999), we anticipated that the outcomes in parental mediation, parental acculturation and educational television viewing by their children would be different between Asian and Hispanic groups and that family SES indicators and parental mediation behav- iours would predict children’s educational television viewing amount. For example, we hypothesized that parental mediation operates as a partial mediating variable for the relation between parental acculturation and children’s educational programme viewing amount. In light of mixed prior findings on SES indicators, we did not make a specific directional prediction regarding their relation to educational television viewing but rather just posited that there would be significant relations. Given the absence of substantial prior investigation of the other possible relations among acculturation indicators, parental mediation behaviours and children’s educational television viewing, we considered these aspects of the model as exploratory and did not have explicit a priori hypotheses for each pathway.

METHOD

Participants

Eligible participants were parents from immigrant families in the U.S. with children between 3 and 6years old. According to the 2010 Census Questionnaire Reference Book, Hispanic Americans or Latino are immigrants who come from Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba or Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America. Asian Americans are immigrants who come from Asian countries such as China, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Cambodia (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). Considering acculturation processes indicating that immigrants appear to be more assimilated into the host culture after three generations (Sam, 2006), it is likely that parents in immigrant families were most appropriate for the study if they were within three generations of arrival in the U.S. The first generation includes people who were born outside the U.S., the second generation includes people whowere born in the U.S. to foreign-born parents and the third generation includes people who were born in the U.S. to U.S.-born parents (Glick & White, 2004). A mechanism utilized for increasing potential participation was that the survey was available for completion both in paper and online. Prior research demonstrated that samples collected by electronic survey were diverse in terms of demographic features such as gender, SES, age and geographic region (Kim, Chelladurai, & Trail, 2007; Shannon& Bradshaw, 2002). Incentives were also utilized in that participants were rewarded by lottery for their completion of the survey. Furthermore, schools, which helped to distribute some of the surveys, received a thank-you gift.

The sample (n=171) was composed of 45.0% Asians, 46.8% Hispanics, 7.0% European-Americans, and 1.2%AfricanAmericans. Participants came from 17 differ- ent states across the U.S. Fourteen participants were neither Asian nor Hispanic, but theywere eligible participants and thuswere retained in the overall sample analyses. Overall, 151 (21.0%) electronic survey responses were received of 706 emailed cover letters with survey links and 51 telephone call follow-ups, and 20 (6.0%) paper surveys were received of 300 mailed surveys. It should be noted that there was not

406 Y. Zhao and B.M. Phillips

a specific way to know how many different people were given the survey links or copies by these schools or organizations, so the response rate was an approximated calculation (i.e. each cover letter was likely distributed to multiple eligible individ- uals).The demographic characteristics of children and families overall and by groups of Asian and Hispanic are presented in Table 1. Of the 171 returned surveys, 47 (27.5%) were completed by fathers and 124 (72.5%) were completed by mothers.

Measures

A parent survey with four parts was created to measure children’s educational television viewing amounts, parental mediation and parental acculturation. The first part of the survey consisted of six items that investigated the background of parents including gender, ethnicity, generation, education, occupation and household annual income. The second part of the survey, including five questions, asked parents about their children’s background such as siblings, age and gender, children’s language use preference at home and school, and children’s television viewing (viewing amount and the content). In terms of viewing content, 29 educational television programmes

Table 1. Child and family demographic characteristics overall and by group

All Asian Hispanic

Sample size 171 77 80 Family characteristics Parental education (years) Some college College High school

M= 14.54 (SD=4.27) M= 16.68 (SD= 4.01) M= 12.36 (SD= 3.09) Family annual income <$16 000 15.2% 22.1% 11.3% $17 000–30 000 29.2% 23.4% 33.8% $30 000–75 000 25.2% 26.0% 25.0% $75 000–100 000 14.6% 14.3% 12.5% $100 000–150 000 11.7% 7.8% 16.3% >$150 000 4.1% 6.5% 1.3% Number of children by family (mean)

2.04 (SD=1.12) 1.82 (SD= 1.06) 2.28 (SD= 1.18)

Generation (parents) 88.8% First 94.7% First 83.8% First 11.2% Second 5.3% Second 16.3% Second

Child characteristics Gender 49.4% boys 48.7% boys 47.5% boys Age (years) M=4.74 (SD= 1.21) M=4.59 (SD= 1.61) M= 4.88 (SD=1.24) Children numbers by age Age 3: 38 Age 3: 18 Age 3: 16

Age 4: 28 Age 4: 16 Age 4: 10 Age 5: 51 Age 5: 22 Age 5: 26 Age 6: 53 Age 6: 20 Age 6: 28

Born in the U.S. 73.8% 64.0% 87.3% Language use at home 32.9% English 43.4% English 15.5% English

36.5% Spanish 32.9% Chinese 77.5% Spanish 16.8% Chinese 23.7% Others 7.6% Others 14.9% Others

Language use at school 95.9% English 96.1% English 96.3% English

Note. The age information for one child was missing for the Asian group.

Educational TV Viewing in Immigrant Families 407

from PBS were listed. Parents were asked to mark all educational television programmes that their child often watched (i.e. at least once a week). The third part of the survey contained 16 items – 15 of them (a= .90)were adapted from the 5-point Likert scale of parental mediation of television viewing fromValkenburg et al. (1999), who provided preliminary evidence of validity via factor analysis. Several example items are ‘how often do you try to help this child understand what they see in an educational television programme’ for instructive mediation, ‘how often do you forbid your child to watch certain programmes’ for restrictive mediation and ‘how often do you watch together because you both like an educational programme’ for coviewingmediation. The fourth part of the survey (a= .70)was adapted fromMarin and Gamba (1996) and Stilling (1997) to measure parental acculturation in three aspects of language, food andmedia (22 items in total). The validity of these accultur- ation items was also examined by factor analysis (Marin & Gamba, 1996), which supported the categories of language (i.e. language use and proficiency) and media. The food category (two items) was added into the survey, following suggestions by Arends-Tóth and van de Vijer (2006) in assessment of psychological acculturation. Two item categories (i.e. American and ethnic) were constructed in the acculturation measure: a score of 33 and higher in the first category signified high American preferences and, in the second category, signified high ethnic preferences. Through use of these cut-off scores, acculturation patterns among participants are presented as four categories for descriptive purposes: integrated (high American/high ethnic), assimilated (high American/low ethnic), separated (low American / high ethnic) and marginalized (low American / low ethnic). However, for statistical analyses, continu- ous data for each aspect of acculturation were used. Example items included ‘How often do you speak English’, ‘How often do you eat your own ethnic food’ and ‘How often do you watch television programmes in English’.

Procedure

Surveys were translated by native speakers in Spanish and Chinese. The two languages were selected because virtually all Hispanic immigrants speak Spanish and the largest population subgroup among Asian Americans is Chinese (23%; U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). The survey was distributed to parents in both English and the anticipated home language, so that parents could select the language in which they were most comfortable to respond. Before distribution, back translations were completed, and native speakers with an educational psychology and linguistics background checked all the wording of these items. There were several sources for recruiting eligible participants. First, the authors contacted the directors of centres and organizations for immigrants such as the Hispanic American Association and the AsianAmericanAssociation and asked for their help to distribute surveys. Second, the authors contacted international centres or similar centres at universities across the U.S., which served many international students and their families. Third, the authors contacted schools and child care centres in metropolitan areas known to have large eligible populations and asked for their help to distribute surveys. Fourth, the authors also collected some convenience samples, such as contacting schools and child care centres known to serve immigrant populations that have participated in prior research studies. Parents were contacted by either the researcher or their director (e.g. the director of a child care centre or of a community organization) via email or mail. Depending on their preferences, each parent participated by either visiting the website where they could complete the survey or returning the completed survey forms in the postage-paid envelopes provided.

408 Y. Zhao and B.M. Phillips

RESULTS

The results are presented in three parts: the first part includes the sample descriptive statistics; the second part includes one-way ANOVA tests of the group differences between Asian and Hispanic families in educational television viewing amount, and parental mediation and acculturation types; the third part is the path analyses of the overall relations among these variables.

Preliminary Analyses

Some transformations of coding were made to parental demographic variables such that categorical education levels were recalculated into average years in which one would achieve such educational levels (e.g. high school= 12years; Master’s degree= 18years). Standardized scores for categories of occupation were utilized (Kim, Han, Shin, Kim, & Lee, 2005). First, the nominal variables were transformed into ordinal variables according to aU.S. Census list of occupation ranks. Then, each occupational rank used by the Census corresponded to a standardized score; these scores were normalized and standardized from national income and education distributions associated with each occupation (e.g. manual workers = 46 and managers = 59; Green, 1970). Results indicated that more parents in Hispanic families were born in the U.S. than parents in Asian families, whereas Asian parents had a higher educa- tional level than did Hispanic parents (Table 1). Most families reported income in the range of $17 000–30 000; however, the nonsignificant results of chi-square tests for independence (w [5]2 = 9.50, p= .09) demonstrated that there was no statistically significant difference in annual income between Asian and Hispanic families. The correlation between education and occupation was statistically significant and positive (r= .68, p< .01).

The means and standard deviations for parental mediation and parental acculturation are presented in Table 2.The descriptive categorization of acculturation types indicated that the majority of the sample were classified as integrated (70% overall, 76% Asian families, 64% Hispanic families), whereas approximately 24% of

Table 2. Descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA and Welch tests

All (n= 171) Asian (n=77) Hispanic (n= 80) ANOVA or Welch F values

M SD M SD M SD

Educational TV viewing 12.33* Parental mediation Instructive 15.93 4.43 15.88 3.41 16.14 5.23 .14 (W) Restrictive 16.86 4.86 17.61 3.58 16.20 5.82 3.28 (W) Coviewing 17.76 3.92 16.19 3.30 19.62 3.42 39.72**

Parental acculturation Language 30.81 5.88 31.28 4.79 30.08 6.83 1.62 (W) Food 4.90 1.37 4.66 1.09 5.03 1.61 2.70 (W) Media 24.84 3.23 24.45 3.39 25.13 3.20 1.63 (W)

Note. M=mean; SD= standard deviation. A (W) after an F value means the assumption of homogeneity of variances were violated and the Welch tests were conducted and reported; the tests for the other variables were one-way ANOVA. *p< .01, **p< .001.

Educational TV Viewing in Immigrant Families 409

the sample were classified as separated. None were marginalized, and approxi- mately 4% were assimilated; this represented no Asian families but 11% of the Hispanic families. There were significant, positive correlations between instructive mediation, and restrictive and coviewing mediation (r= .68, p< .01; and r= .39, p< .01), respectively (Table 3). Language, one aspect of parental acculturation, was positively correlated with instructive and restrictive – two types of parental media- tion (r= .31, p< .01; and r= .38, p< .01).

The hours that children viewed television, including educational television, were self-reported by parents both for weekdays and weekends. Reported hours ranged from 0 to 8hours per day. On average, children in immigrant families watched PBS shows 2.06hours per day, whereas they watched other general television pro- grammes 1.44hours per day. Restrictive mediation and parental education were negatively correlated with children’s educational programme viewing amount (r=�.20, p< .05, and r=�.27, p< .01, respectively; Table 3).

Asian and Hispanic Group Differences: One-way ANOVA Tests

One-way ANOVA tests were conducted to see whether there were significant differences between Asian and Hispanic families in children’s educational televi- sion viewing, parental mediation and acculturation (RQ1, RQ2 and RQ3, respec- tively). To control for Type I error, the Bonferroni correction (Shaffer, 1995) was applied to each ANOVA test, and only results after correction are reported as signif- icant. A one-way ANOVA analysis indicated that the difference in the amounts of viewing educational programmes was statistically significant between Asian and Hispanic children, F(1, 152) = 12.33, p= .00, Z2 = .08; Table 2. The effect size was moderate (Ferguson, 2009). The assumption of homogeneity of variances was checked (Levene, 1960), and the assumption was met (p= .20).

One-way ANOVA were also conducted to test for group differences in each of the three types of parental mediation (i.e. instructive, restrictive and coviewing). The re- sults showed that the difference in frequency of coviewing mediation was statistically significant between Asian and Hispanic parents, F(1, 151)=39.72, p= .00, Z2 = .21; Table 2, whereas there were no statistically significant differences in instructive, F(1, 151)= .13, p= .72, and restrictive mediation behaviours, F(1, 151) =3.18,

Table 3. Correlations among observed variables

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

1.Education 1 2.Occupation .68** 1 3.Instructive mediation .08 �.05 1 4.Restrictive mediation .18* .01 .68** 1 5.Coviewing mediation �.22* �.15 .39** .16* 1 6.Language .12 .30** .31** .38** .06 1 7.Food .07 .16* .26* .15 �.02 .31** 1 8.Media .07 .15 .15 .18* �.03 .41** .37** 1 9.ETVAmt �.27** �.05 �.08 �.20* .10 .00 .02 �.00 1 10.General TVAmt �.18* �.00 �.00 �.09 �.06 .14 .07 �.06 .31** 1

Note.ETV Amt= the amount of educational television programmes that children watched every day; General TVAmt= the amount of general television viewing every day. *p< .05, **p< .01.

410 Y. Zhao and B.M. Phillips

p= .08, between Asian and Hispanic parents. The assumption of homogeneity of variances was met for coviewing mediation but violated for instructive and re- strictive mediation. The Welch test (Welch, 1951) is an alternative F test to be used when the homogeneity of variances is violated, and it was recommended by Lix, Keselman, and Keselman (1996) that the Welch test could be used in most one-way analyses regardless of the equality of group sizes and sample size. Therefore, the Welch test was conducted, and the results of instructive me- diation and restrictive mediation were F(1, 135)= .14, p= .71 and F(1, 131)=3.28, p= .07, respectively. However, there were no significant differences between the Asian and Hispanic groups in instructive and restrictive mediation frequencies.

With regard to the group differences in parental acculturation aspects, the as- sumption of homogeneity of variances was violated. Instead, the Welch test (1951) was conducted for the three aspects of parental acculturation (i.e. language, food and media) between the Asian and Hispanic groups. The results were F(1, 140)=1.62, p= .21 for language, F(1, 138)=2.70, p= .10 for food and F(1, 149)=1.63, p= .20 for media (Table 2), which show that there were no differences between Asian and Hispanic parents in the three aspects of parental acculturation.

Overall Relations: Path Analysis

Given the few differences found between Asian and Hispanic families, the subgroups were combined for the overall model analysis. The fourth research ques- tion (RQ4), investigating the overall relations among parental education and occupa- tion, parental mediation, parental acculturation and children’s educational television viewing, was analysed by path analysis. Path analysis is the estimation of expected causal relations among observed variables (Kline, 2005). The fully saturated model with all possible pathways between variables was first tested (Model 1; Table 4). Because all the variables were multivariate normal, the maximum likelihood estima- tionmethodwas used to analyseModel 1. On the basis ofModel 1, the significance of paths and the modification index were checked. Modification index values suggest that adding any of the parameters listed in the output will reduce the model chi- square by at least 3.84. Nonsignificant paths (a> .05) were removed or fixed to zero one group by one group from large to small in order to achieve a parsimonious model (simple and good fit). Eight models were tested, and some necessary modifi- cations were made. The chi-square and model fit indices for these models are provided in Table 4.

A stepwise comparison procedure was used to select the final model. The chi- square difference test was used to evaluate the relative fit of two nested models (i.e. Models 7 and 8). The results indicated that the chi-square difference test was significant (Δw2 [1] = 4.38> w2critical value [1] = 3.84, a= .05), which suggests that Model 8 fits significantly better than Model 7. On the basis of the stepwise model comparison procedure, as well as the chi-square difference test, Model 8 (see Figure 1 for standardized parameters) was selected as the final model. The results suggested that parental education and restrictive mediation significantly, negatively, predicted the amount of children’s educational television viewing and that language in parental acculturation positively predicted instructive and restric- tive mediation. In addition, parental education was positively related to parental occupation. Given its negligible bivariate relation with educational television view- ing, the significant pathway between occupation and the outcome is likely the result of its suppressor role in the model and should not necessarily be interpreted (Maassen & Bakker, 2001).

Educational TV Viewing in Immigrant Families 411

Ta bl e 4.

R es ul ts

fr om

a st ep

w is e m od

el co m pa

ri so n of

in fl ue

nc es

on ch

ild re n’ s ed

uc at io na

lt el ev

is io n vi ew

in g

M od

el s

w2 df

C FI

T L I

R M SE

A SR

M R

M od

el 1:

Fu lly

sa tu ra te d m od

el .0 0

0 1. 00

1. 00

.0 0

M od

el 2:

R em

ov ed

fo ur

no ns ig ni fi ca nt

pa th s, E d uc

at io n ➔

M ed

ia ,

M ed

ia ➔

R es tr ic ti ve

, Fo

od ➔

C ov

ie w in g,

an d Fo

od ➔

E T V A m t

.1 1

4 1. 00

1. 13

.0 0

M od

el 3:

R em

ov ed

si x no

ns ig ni fi ca nt

pa th s, E d uc

at io n ➔

Fo od

, Fo

od ➔

R es tr ic ti ve

, O cc up

at io n ➔

C ov

ie w in g,

In st ru ct iv e ➔

E T V A m t, L an

gu ag

e ➔

E T V A m t, an

d M ed

ia ➔

E T V A m t

1. 34

10 1. 00

1. 12

.0 0

.0 1

M od

el 4:

R em

ov ed

fo ur

no ns ig ni fi ca nt

pa th s, M ed

ia ➔

In st ru ct iv e,

E d uc

at io n ➔

In st ru ct iv e,

O cc up

at io n ➔

In st ru ct iv e,

an d M ed

ia ➔

C ov

ie w in g

2. 66

14 1. 00

1. 12

.0 0

.0 2

M od

el 5:

R em

ov ed

fo ur

no ns ig ni fi ca nt

pa th s, O cc up

at io n ➔

M ed

ia ,

O cc up

at io n ➔

R es tr ic ti ve

, L an

gu ag

e ➔

C ov

ie w in g,

an d C ov

ie w in g ➔

E T V A m t

7. 68

18 1. 00

1. 08

.0 0

.0 3

M od

el 6:

R em

ov ed

tw o no

ns ig ni fi ca nt

pa th s, E d uc

at io n ➔

L an

gu ag

e an

d O cc up

at io n ➔

Fo od

12 .4 5

20 1. 00

1. 05

.0 0

.0 4

M od

el 7:

R em

ov ed

on e no

ns ig ni fi ca nt

pa th ,E

d uc

at io n ➔

R es tr ic ti ve

16 .1 9

21 1. 00

1. 03

.0 0

.0 5

M od

el 8:

A d d a co va

ri an

ce be

tw ee n E d uc

at io n an

d R es tr ic ti ve

11 .8 2

20 1. 00

1. 05

.0 0

.0 4

N ot e.

E T V

A m t=

th e am

ou nt

of ed

uc at io na

l te le vi si on

pr og

ra m m es

th at

ch ild

re n

w at ch

ed ev

er y

d ay

; C FI

= co m pa

ra ti ve

fi t in d ex ; T L I=

Tu ck er –L

ew is

in d ex ;

R M SE

A = ro ot

m ea n sq ua

re er ro r of

ap pr ox

im at io n;

SR M R = st an

d ar d iz ed

ro ot

m ea n sq ua

re re si d ua

412 Y. Zhao and B.M. Phillips

The results of the overall model demonstrated that one aspect of parental mediation, restrictive mediation had significant correlations with both language in parental acculturation and educational television viewing by children. There were also indirect effects from parental occupation to educational television viewing amount (i.e. occupation➔ language➔ restrictive mediation➔ educational television viewing amount; Table 5). In other words, parental occupation, rather than parental education, is more likely to affect parental acculturation (language), and this effect may continue to influence parental mediation patterns (restrictive mediation). Restrictive mediation may then affect children’s educational television viewing amount negatively.

DISCUSSION

This present study explored whether there were significant differences among immigrant families between Asian and Hispanic parents of young children in pa- rental mediation, parental acculturation and their children’s educational programme viewing, as well as the relations among these three concepts (Figure 1). The key findings of the present study included first, Hispanic children watched significantly more television overall and specifically more educational television than did Asian children, and second, Hispanic parents significantly enacted more coviewing mediation behaviours than did Asian parents. Third, language in parental acculturation significantly predicted instructive and restrictive parental mediation. Fourth, parental occupation significantly predicted language in paren- tal acculturation.

On average, children watched television 3.50 hours per day, which is consistent with a national survey finding that 43% of the children watched television for at

Figure 1. Final pathmodel with standardized parameters (Model 8). Edu=Education; Occu= Occupation; Lang=Language; Instr = Instructive mediation; Restr =Restrictive mediation; Coview=Coviewingmediation; ETVAmt= the amount of educational television programmes that children watched every day; PA=parental acculturation; PM=parental mediation. *p< .01, **p< .001.

Educational TV Viewing in Immigrant Families 413

Ta bl e 5.

St an

d ar d iz ed

d ir ec t, in d ir ec t an

d to ta le

ff ec ts

of th e fi na

lm od

el (M

od el

D ep

en d en

t va

ri ab

le s

In d ep

en d en

t va

ri ab

le s

L an

gu ag

e In st ru ct iv e

R es tr ic ti ve

E T V A m t

D ir ec t

In d ir ec t

To ta l

D ir ec t

In d ir ec t

To ta l

D ir ec t

In d ir ec t

To ta l

D ir ec t

In d ir ec t

To ta l

E d uc

at io n

�. 37 2* *

O cc up

at io n

.2 78 **

.1 05 *

.2 09 *

�. 01 8

.1 92 *

L an

gu ag

e .2 20 *

.2 20 *

.3 77 **

�. 06 3*

Fo od

.1 72 *

R es tr ic ti ve

�. 16 8*

N ot e. E T V A m t, th e am

ou nt

of ed

uc at io na

lt el ev

is io n pr og

ra m m es

th at

ch ild

re n w at ch

ed ev

er y d ay .

*p < .0 5,

** p < .0 01

414 Y. Zhao and B.M. Phillips

least 2 hours in a typical day (Rideout & Hamel, 2006). Children in Asian immi- grant families spend significantly less time watching PBS shows than children in Hispanic immigrant families. There are two possible explanations for this finding. First, the demographic statistics in the sample showed that on average, Asian families reported a higher average parental educational level than did the Hispanic families, and parental education has previously (and in the present study) been found to be negatively related to overall television viewing (Linebarger, 2010). Children of parents with low levels of education typically watch more tele- vision programmes in general, and the overall television viewing amount seems to drive the educational television programmes viewing amount (Phillips & Lonigan, 2009). In accordance with this explanation, education was negatively related to educational television viewing within this sample. Second, more Hispanic parents reported engaging in coviewing mediation of television viewing than did Asian parents. The findings provide additional support for previous research (Bryant & Bryant, 2001) that children whose parents coviewed television with them would watch more television compared with children watching alone.

The results showed significant differences between Asian and Hispanic groups in coviewing mediation but not in instructive and restrictive mediations. Hispanic parents reported that their most frequent mediation type was coviewing media- tion. Parental education was significantly, negatively, related to coviewing media- tion (Warren, 2005), and Hispanic parents in this sample reported a lower parental education than Asian parents; thus, they might engage in more coviewing media- tion than the Asian parents. With regard to restrictive mediation, the result contrasted with that for coviewing mediation. Asian parents reported more restric- tive mediation compared with Hispanic parents. This outcome may stem from findings that education is often highly emphasized in Asian immigrant families (Eng et al., 2008). Further, they tend to set rules to regulate their children, and children are expected to have unquestioning obedience to their parents. Under this kind of parenting, children might experience more restrictive mediation of television viewing (Buerkel-Rothfuss & Buerkel, 2001). Consequently, it was not surprising to see that Asian parents were more restrictive of children’s television viewing than Hispanic parents in this sample. Parents who frequently engage in restrictive media- tion may restrict the overall television viewing of children, which may accordingly reduce viewing amounts for educational television programmes.

In the present study, restrictive mediation was significantly positively correlated to instructive mediation, such that parents who tended to set rules for their children on watching television were more likely to ask questions and guide children to think during viewing. When these two mediation behaviours are combined, known as active parental mediation (Warren, 2003, 2005), it may facilitate good outcomes for the language development of children. However, restrictivemediation is not necessar- ily good or bad, and it may depend on how parents engage in the communications with their children. That is, it may be better that parents regulate children’s viewing time and content without hurting their feelings and motivations to learn.

Prior studies by Warren (2003, 2005) indicated that parents’ attitudes towards television were related to the parental mediation types. Parents’ attitudes towards television significantly and positively predicted instructive and restrictive media- tions but not coviewing mediation (Warren, 2005). This finding suggests that the influences of the macrosystem and exosystem from Bronfenbrenner’s model decreased and the influences of the mesosystem (parents’ attitudes) increased. This model, taking acculturation as an indicator of attitude, might explain our results that there were no significant differences in instructive and restrictive mediation types between Asian and Hispanic families.

Educational TV Viewing in Immigrant Families 415

Conceptually, although some indicators within each (e.g. restrictive and coviewing mediation) were not highly correlated, parental acculturation and paren- tal mediation could be treated as two overall constructs for the purposes of this discussion. Parental acculturation significantly predicted parental mediation in some aspects (Figure 1). Parents with a higher acculturation level appear to be more likely to enact active parental mediation behaviours, inwhich parents are actively involved with their children by talking, explaining, asking questions and setting rules. High levels of acculturation include both integrated and assimilated acculturation patterns. Because the proportion of immigrants categorized as assimilated was very small, most of the participants were considered tomatch the integrated acculturation pattern. These participants may have high English proficiency, high frequency of English use, high frequency of American media use and high motivation to use media to learn American culture.

A study by Ying and Han (2008) indicated that parental acculturation, especially language acculturation (higher English language proficiency), significantly predicted active parental involvement at school and home (e.g. parents’ interactions with teachers, parents helping children complete homework and parents readingwith chil- dren). A parallel could be drawn from this earlier study, because parental mediation is also a parental involvement behaviour related to children’s television viewing. From this perspective, the results that parental acculturation significantly predicted parental mediation are in line with the previous research.

Nonactive parentalmediation includes coviewingmediation, inwhich parents are just physically present to watch television together with their children and do not necessarily create educational occasions or have linguistic interactions with their children. Coviewing mediation was negatively correlated with parental education. It is likely that parents in this kind of mediation may just take it for granted that children could acquire literacy knowledge from educational television automatically, but ignore or not be aware of the parental role of guiding children to think and enhancing children’s learning outcomes through language interactions while watching. In addition, some parents from lower-SES families, whomay have towork two or three jobs to support families, may have no time or energy to be actively in- volved with children’s television viewing (i.e. instructive and restrictive mediations).

Among the SES predictors, only parental occupation was positively predictive of parental acculturation. Immigrant professionals (i.e. thosewith a higher occupational coding) seem to be more likely than parents with blue collar positions (e.g. manual laborers) to be exposed to the whole American community rather than only their own ethnic community, and they may have more opportunities to interact with the American community. These opportunities may in turn provide parents with increased English proficiency and motivation to speak in this language.

The assimilation rates, in contrast to integrated or separated patterns, were very low for both Asian and Hispanic parents, although both subgroups reported a pro- portion of second-generation parents. In past decades, immigrants disproportionally concentrated in several metropolitan locations such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami and Chicago, and these concentrations provided a variety of large immigrant communities in these metropolitan areas (i.e. the Mexican community in Los Angeles, Cuban community in Miami and Chinese community in San Francisco and New York; Portes & Rumbaut, 2006). Immigrants may have less pressure and motivation to give up their own cultures while still living in their native cultural community (e.g. China town, East LA and Little Italy) within the new country (Fix et al., 2001; Portes & Rumbaut, 2006). It is likely that these individuals have just selectively adapted to American society. Perhaps, this is the reason that the majority of Asian and Hispanic immigrants in this sample adopted the strategy of integrated

416 Y. Zhao and B.M. Phillips

acculturation, which is selectively learning the American culture while maintaining the native one. Future research should target larger proportions of second- generation and third-generation immigrant families to learn whether these accultur- ation patterns replicate.

Limitations

The primary limitation of this studywas that the sample sizewas not large, as well as convenience sampling; thus, the results of this studymay not fully generalize to other populations. As the sample was ascertained through participation in community centres and child care centres, it is not possible to determine its full representative- ness of the eligible immigrant population of families with young children. We provided potential participants in multiple states with the opportunity to respond either via paper or via electronic survey and provided the survey in multiple lan- guages to increase the generalizability. Moreover, the findings of electronic surveys have been found to be consistent with traditional data collection and can be general- ized to a larger population (Boyer, Olson, Calantone, & Jackson, 2002; Gosling, Vazire, Srivastava, & John, 2004; Kim et al., 2007; Shannon & Bradshaw, 2002). In further investigations, the goal is to increase the robustness of the path models with larger, ideally nationally representative samples.

A second limitation relates to the item investigating income, which only asked parents to mark a range of family annual income, did not allow finer grain differen- tiations between groups, although it likely increased respondents’ comfort with providing this type of sensitive material. It should also be noted that despite the experience and qualifications of some recent immigrants, they are more likely to ‘enter at the bottom of their respective occupational ladders’ (Portes & Rumbaut, 2006, p. 58). For instance, immigrant professionals such as engineers and doctors often accept less desirable entry jobs within their professions or even outside them; immigrant manual workers, or illegal manual workers, have to accept the most arduous jobs with the lowest pay. Likewise, immigrant entrepreneurs often start small shops in the inner city, serving their own ethnic community (Portes & Rumbaut, 2006). Thus, although in general, parental education was positively related to parental occupation in the final model, their relation may need to be carefully scrutinized because of this possible underemployment issue. Given that immigrant parents who come as graduate students to the U.S. may be low- income families and other newly arrived immigrants may be underemployed, the validity of the measures of income and occupation as indicators of other behaviours may have been threatened. Third, because of the difficulties of conducting assessments with children in 17 states across the U.S., language out- comes of the children were not measured. On the basis of the limitations, the direction of the extended research is towards increasing the sample size and the accuracy of family SES measurement. Also, an experimental design study might illuminate the effects of different types of mediation behaviours of educa- tional television programme viewing on the language outcomes of children in immigrant families. Parenting variables (e.g. parenting style) and cultural factors (e.g. parental language use and values such as familism) might also be considered in future research. For example, immigrant families may watch non-English language channels such as those broadcasting in Spanish and Chinese, a topic that is worth exploring in future research. Also important for future study would be investigation of the popularity of native-language children’s videos and websites among immigrant families.

Educational TV Viewing in Immigrant Families 417

Conclusion

In conclusion, as addressed in the literature review, educational television viewing could help the language and literacy development for children from at-risk back- grounds. Accordingly, two conclusions of educational implications could be drawn. First, it would be helpful if parents from varying cultural backgrounds could enact active parental mediation behaviours (instructive and restrictive)while their children watch educational television. Active parental mediation behaviours mean that parents intentionally ask questions during viewing, guide children to think, regulate the viewing amount/content and always preview programmes. Second, the results suggests that parents are comfortable with exposing their children to educational television andmay also be comfortable with using educational television as a supple- mentary tool for teaching and learning in classrooms under the circumstances of careful previewing by researchers and teachers. Some studies already showed that educational television used in the classroom improved the literacy development of children from at-risk backgrounds (Phillips & Zhao, 2011; Uchikoshi, 2005, 2006). Few research studies existed to investigate the Asian and Hispanic group differences in educational television programmes viewing by children, parental mediation and parental acculturation, as well as the relations among these three variables. To the best of our knowledge, the present study serves as an initial exploration into the topic of educational television viewing of children in immigrant families, and it awaits replication from other studies on immigrants. Owing to the rapid increase of the Asian andHispanic immigrant population, the present studywarrants further inves- tigations in the future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to Pam Burris, Galiya Tabulda, Kayla Sedgwick and Smriti Jangra for their comments on the article. The valuable suggestions from Alysia Roehrig, Barbara Foorman and Yanyun Yang are also appreciated.

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