Method
Participants
Participants were Afro-Caribbean and Latino immigrant families who participated in one of
two larger studies of young (i.e., 4–5 years) ethnic minority children at school entry. Study 1
was a randomized controlled trial of a family-focused, school-based universal intervention
for all students enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs in urban elementary schools serving
ethnically diverse students (n = 1,050; Brotman et al., 2013). The present study included all
foreign-born parents from English-speaking Afro-Caribbean countries (n = 464) who had
complete data on the study variables (n = 293; 63%). Missing data were largely due to our
phased consent procedure (described below) in which parents could enroll children in the
study without participating in the parent interview (i.e., 24% of parents did not participate in
parent interviews; the remaining 13% had missing data on study variables). Study 2 was a
prospective longitudinal study of early childhood development in 412 Latino prekindergarten
and kindergarten children attending urban, public elementary schools. For the
present study, only families of foreign-born mothers (n = 375) with complete data (n = 343;
91%) were included. The final sample included 636 (293 Afro-Caribbean; 343 Latino)
immigrant families. Families that were included in the present study did not differ from the
larger study samples on demographic characteristics (i.e., education, employment, marital
status, gender, child and parent age) or on a standardized test of child school readiness. In
the Afro-Caribbean sample, however, families who were included had higher teacher-rated
parent involvement at home but similar levels of parent involvement at school.