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Versión en español

Every year, participants in the California Families Project expect a call. This year marks the 20th since the study launched at UC Davis with the same roughly 1,700 participants from Yolo and Sacramento Counties.  

Today, many of those who joined at 10 years old have children of their own. Some families have moved to Oregon, Texas, Washington and even to states in Mexico. The research team stays in touch wherever they go.  

“We're following people over long periods of time and watching them grow and evolve and develop and have different experiences,” said Richard Robins, the project's director and a professor of psychology in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. 

The California Families Project is the most comprehensive long-term study of Latino families in the U.S. It has built an unparalleled dataset that researchers at UC Davis and other leading universities around the world use to study the complexity of challenges facing Mexican-origin families in California. This extensive body of research has uncovered a powerful source of strength and resilience: close family bonds. 

Addressing prejudice early 

Prejudice or racism aren’t always sudden or violent. Keita Christophe, an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Cultural Development Science Lab at McGill University in Canada, said it can also be like an accumulation of mosquito bites.  

Microaggressions, such as when someone is inexplicably impatient or rude, may be annoying on their own but become more and more painful as they accumulate across days, weeks, months and years.   

 

Christophe studies how discrimination affects depression and anxiety as well as what factors strengthen self-esteem, meaning and purpose in life. He wants to understand how cultural and family factors can create healthy, thriving and resilient kids in an unequal society.  

The challenge is a steep one. An increasing number of research studies are finding just how deeply discrimination and different forms of unfair treatment affect health across people’s lives.  

“Speaking to policy makers and many organizations, I don't think it has sunk in that discrimination is real and that it affects people’s mental and physical health,” said Christophe.  

Christophe first got connected to the California Families Project as a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where his faculty mentor Gaby Livas had worked with Robins in the past. The project has been part of Christophe’s research ever since.  

One of his recent studies with California Families Project data found that the experience of discrimination increased when kids advanced grades in school. It also found that the increased discrimination was associated with higher levels of anxiety and other mental health risks in later years.  

“We learned that what you experience in fifth grade matters for how anxious you are in 12th grade,” said Christophe. 

Identifying the unique experiences of Latino families 

Olivia Atherton, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Riverside, knows the California Families Project data better than almost anyone. For five years she managed it while completing her Ph.D. at UC Davis. She continues to help Robins expand the project today.  

Standard survey responses make up the core of the project’s data, but there are many more types of data as well. There are measures of health, like blood pressure, lung capacity and data from activity and sleep monitors. There are observational data, such as videotaped interactions between family members, as well as more recent qualitative questions where participants were asked to talk about their lives.

Brain scans were part of a smaller study within the broader project. There are also school records provided by the California Department of Education that make it possible to study outcomes like grades and going to college.  

Atherton studies how people’s personalities and environmental contexts change over time to affect their health and well-being. Most research in this and other areas of psychology come from participants who are primarily white and highly educated. She said that including people who don't share those social identities, such as Latinos, can lead to insights we could not possibly know otherwise.  

“They experience not only the same universal kinds of transitions that many people have in life, like marriage, children or getting a job, but there are also culturally unique processes that shape their development and health,” said Atherton. 

In particular, she said, people of Mexican origin in the U.S. experience discrimination, segregation and prejudice that shape their development and health from childhood. This can happen individually, but also structurally if people have limited access to fresh food or gyms and parks in their neighborhoods.  

Research from the California Families Project has shown that experiencing discrimination can also lead to memory impairment and risk for dementia. A body of research shows that discrimination is an emerging risk factor for disease. 

The reason, said Atherton, is how discrimination affects the body.  

“We know that things like discrimination can get under the skin to influence people's nervous systems and their cardiovascular systems, which then has a lot of cascading influences on risk for various diseases,” said Atherton. 

Leveraging research to prevent suicide 

Jocelyn Meza, an assistant professor the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, frequently treats patients struggling with acculturative stress, which is the stress of adjusting to a new culture or society.  

"Many patients report experiencing discrimination at their kid's school or in the workplace, and some have fears of deportation,” said Meza. “I hear a lot of parents share that their kids also experience these things, so it's really a shared experience, not just something that parents experience alone.” 

Meza, director of the UCLA Health Equity & Access Research & Treatment (HEART) Lab, is both a clinician and a researcher. Her clinical work focuses on suicide prevention. Nearly all of the kids she treats have either attempted suicide or have had suicidal thoughts.  

Latino children ages 8 to 12 years old have the largest percent increase in deaths by suicide in the last 20 years.  

“How does that even happen?” said Meza. “What kind of environment are we creating for these kids for them to feel that much despair?” 

Being both clinician and researcher means that if Meza doesn’t have the tools to treat her patients, she can launch a new study to build those tools from the ground up. She said this is necessary in part because research on minoritized youth — including Latinos — is scarce.  

Meza found the California Families Project by chance. One of her students knew about it and sent her the link to the website. Her first thought? 

“This is the ideal study that I would dream of in my head,” she said. 

She recently submitted a grant proposal with Robins to study how cultural values can buffer when kids experience depression and other clinical risk factors for suicide. Meza said that a major strength of the California Families Project is that it doesn't just focus on negative outcomes like depression or suicide, but also on resilience. 

“The California Families Project has all that data because they didn't just focus on the deficits or the risk,” said Meza. “They also focused on the resilience and protective factors.” 

A key source of resilience among Latino families 

Meza’s father lives in Mexico, where she grew up and lived until she was 14. She said that every Sunday was a family day. The family all went to church together and then walked around the town. 

“Family is kind of like a collective identity instead of individual identity,” said Meza. “For a lot of Latino families, the concept of family is just being together, supporting each other and that unity.” 

This togetherness is part of the concept of familismo, or “familism.” It’s the idea that family takes precedence over individual needs. Familismo is a key source of resilience researchers across multiple universities have identified with California Families Project data.  

A recently published paper by Christophe’s graduate student Ariane Desmarais reported that pride in being Mexican-American among kids and their parents declined from the time the kids were about 10-years-old until around age 16 — from about 2007 to 2013 —  but then rebounded throughout the kids’ adolescence and into young adulthood. 

“We think about identity very individualistically,” said Christophe, “but a kid having pride in their heritage might impact how their parents feel, and when parents feel and show their pride in their heritage and their culture it might have an impact on their kids.” 

Robins said that for the study’s participants, their feeling of familismo extends beyond their families to their extended families as well as the broader community of Mexican immigrants. That connection, said Robins, has been consistent since the beginning of the study. 

At the same time, familismo can create conflict for children who might be forced to make hard choices. Parents taking part in the project might want their kids to get a college degree but also expect them to prioritize the family if someone is sick or they need to look after a younger sibling.  

“Often the ones who make it to college are extremely motivated to study, but then they're being called back home because the needs of the family are taking precedent,” said Robins.  

Widening ripple effects from conducting research with families in California 

This year, the project published its 100th paper, one of a handful accepted and published around the same time. 

One study from recent years found that adults who were more optimistic, and whose optimism increased over time, did better on tests of cognitive function and impairment. They were also more physically active and less likely to have depression, sleep problems and social isolation. Each of these factors are likely to improve cognitive health. 

At UC Davis, the project continues to have broad involvement across campus. This includes the California Babies Project, led by Professor of Human Ecology Leah Hibel, which is studying participants who first joined as children. Other sub-studies focus on healthy aging and links between neurobiology and depression.

The project fills a deep need in California, where Latinos make up 40% of the population, 83% of them of Mexican origin. The body of research provides a base of evidence for mental health providers to better serve Latino communities.

“A lot of Latinos feel that there aren't enough psychologists like myself who understand the culture and speak their language,” said Meza.  

In Montreal, Christophe gives community workshops for children and families to help them address their experiences with discrimination and racism. Some of his approaches are based on findings from the California Families project, particularly related to how discrimination might impact a teen’s ethnic pride over time.  

His workshops for teens focus on building a strong identity and providing ways to cope with discrimination. With parents, Christophe shares how to have tough conversations with their kids.  

“Kids are already having experiences with discrimination and prejudice without knowing what to do with them,” said Christophe. “This awareness opens the door to a conversation about different ways to deal with those instances when they do unfortunately come up.” 

Atherton said that the project has inspired her own students, particularly those of Latino or Mexican heritage. They see it as an avenue to benefit their communities by going to graduate school and becoming a professor who continues this work. 

Seeing that people who look like them are represented in research and being celebrated in these different ways with their voices being heard is one of the largest impacts that I've seen.” 

— Olivia Atherton  

The participants who first joined the project at 10 years old have spent most of their lives taking part in it each year. Robins said that he is proud that the project has always been able to provide substantial compensation for participating, $120 for the most recent wave of interviews.  

“We always see a large increase in participation just before Christmas because some families need the compensation to buy gifts for their kids, which they might not have had without the project,” said Robins.  

Karla Cuadros, the interviewing team supervisor, who first joined the project 18 years ago, has seen indirect benefits for some participants. One told her that after an interview he realized he was an alcoholic and reached out for help to one of the community resources the research team provides.  

This fall, Cuadros will be calling and interviewing people who joined the project as grandparents who are now in their 70s and 80s. The overall retention rate, meaning the share of people who have been in the study since the first year, is about 80%.  

“People feel part of something that I think makes them feel special,” said Cuadros. “It makes them feel like they're supporting knowledge that in the long run is going to support the needs of our Mexican-American community.”

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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