Sociopolitical Development among Latinx Child Farmworkers

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review this descriptive study regarding the civic attitudes and behaviors of Latinx child farmworkers. I appreciate the descriptive findings, which suggest that these youth have positive attitudes regarding their community and their ability to effect change, despite showing limited engaged in civic behaviors. I recommend that the authors further contextualize the findings relative to samples from other studies and have explicit recommendations regarding how to engage these youth based on the findings. 

Major revisions

1.     The introduction needs to further engage with the importance of civic attitudes, potentially by highlighting the theoretical role of these attitudes in shaping behavior (e.g., sociopolitical identity theory). For instance, explicitly explain why “Civic attitudes and behaviors are important developmental outcomes to understand in their own right” using empirical studies, and more thoroughly explain the cited findings by Ballard et al., 2019; Ballard & Ozer, 2016; Maker-Castro et al., 2022.

2.     The discussion of mixed status families and the relevance for this sample should be more explicitly described in the Introduction. Relatedly, can data from this sample regarding legal documentation be leveraged to determine the extent to which this literature is relevant to this sample?

3.     The discussion of factors unique to farmworkers (e.g., social hierarchies, dangers of being a farmworker, history of advocacy for this group) is very novel and should be more thoroughly discussed to understand their implications for civic attitudes/behavior in this sample. These points warrant a subsection of the Introduction.

4.     I question whether perceived fairness and belief one can make a difference should be grouped as civic attitudes. Belief in a just world should be foreshadowed as a distinct construct in the Introduction.

5.     Relatedly, a rationale for observing significant associations between civic behaviors and civic connection but not belief in a fair society should be explicitly described in the Discussion, and hypotheses regarding these associations should be identified in the Introduction.

6.     I'm flexible on this point as I know these tests can be challenging, but another way to greatly enhance the potential impact of this manuscript is to conduct invariance testing to determine whether the measures are testing a similar construct across many (or a reasonable subset) of the demographic factors in this sample. Significant differences may not emerge because the items vary and therefore cannot be compared across groups. This inclusion could provide a precedent for whether future studies should make these comparisons and whether different scales should be developed.

7.     I was disappointed that the Discussion situated levels relative to only two studies of Latinx youth. Are these the only studies that are relevant? I believe that the measures have been widely administered and that findings can likely be compared to other studies of Latinx youth and adults, as well as youth with similar socioeconomic status or vocational backgrounds given the points made regarding farmworkers. It's difficult to evaluate whether these rates are comparable to what we would expect for youth and how we could interpret them. I am asking for this not because it is a niche sample, but because the study is entirely descriptive and therefore needs to contribute to the literature by appropriately situating these findings.

8.     Please add an implications and future direction section of the discussion to clarify why this work is needed. The major novelty is the description of why behaviors might be low despite positive civic attitudes. How can we encourage youth to become civically engaged based on these findings, or are we assessing the wrong types of behaviors? If so, what behaviors may be relevant?

9.     Limitations such as the state are acknowledged, but the authors should expand to explain why these limitations are relevant and how they might alter associations.

Minor Revisions

1.     I appreciate the description of attrition. a) Please provide descriptive statistics regarding attrition by testing how all of the baseline measures in Table 1 differ between the participants who attrited versus the 46 who did not. Significant differences would not affect publishability of findings, but generalizeability would need to be more thoroughly discussed and acknowledged in the limitations. A supplemental table could present these descriptive statistics for those who did and did not complete the study. b) What was the compensation at each wave of the study? I understand that much of the descriptive information is available in another citation, but this information is helpful.

2.     In Table 1, please disaggregate Guatemala and Honduras unless there is a reason to suspect revealing only one participant of an ethnic background would risk deanonymizing data. Also, can you add participant ethnicity? For those born in the US, what other countries do they culturally identify with and are they predominately second-generation (i.e., parents were born outside of the US) or third-generation+?

3.     Is P25-P95 a typo? Also please define P25 and P75/P95 at first reference. Why is the median only reported for volunteering? It's fine if it's skewed, but justify this and provide the skew and kurtosis to justify. Including histograms as a supplemental figure may also help with visualization.

4.     Please add the means for the political activities on the original scales on the table.

Author Response

Please see attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In the paper titled „Sociopolitical Development among Latinx Hired Child Farmworkers“ authors seek to describe civic attitudes and behaviours among Latinix child farmworkers in North Carolina. The focus on the political socialisation of the marginalised and understudied groups (such as Latinix hired child farmworkers) is much welcomed as it helps us to broaden our understanding of how the theories of political socialisation (which, let’s be fair, were developed with privileged young people in mind) work among unprivileged youth. Furthermore, extending research to marginalised groups of young people is not only important as a theoretical endeavour but also for finding ways to better social and political inclusion of the young people belonging to these groups. There are large groups of young people who are unrepresented and ignored in the literature on political socialisation and that makes papers focusing on marginalised groups of young people valuable for the field.

Having said that and feeling generally rather positive about this paper, I have a couple of recommendations for improving this paper.

First, the authors declare that they do not specify any hypotheses due to limited prior research on sociopolitical development among Latinix hired child farmworkers. However, providing a few research questions instead of hypotheses could help the readers better understand what were the questions that motivated the research. Despite the explorative nature of the paper, I am sure that the authors had at least some initial research questions in mind when they set out to collect and analyse their data.

My second criticism concerns the sampling and data analysis. While I very much appreciate the efforts that the authors must have made to reach out to a target group that is definitely not easy to reach, I was left with the feeling that the authors have not fully recognised the limits of their sample and made a little bit too bold generalisations. It is important to bear in mind that the sample of this study is anything but a random sample and the authors should acknowledge this throughout their data analysis, presentation of results and discussion. For example, standard deviations should not be calculated in the case of non-probability sampling (see Tables 2, 3 and 4) as it gives a reader an impression of measurement accuracy that the authors cannot actually guarantee in the case of non-probability sample. Instead of giving this kind of false impression of measurement accuracy, I recommend being crystal clear about the limitations of the sample starting from the methods section. For example, I expected to read in the subchapter about the dataset (5.2, p. 4) how recruiting research participants through community partner organisations may have affected the composition of the sample and, even more so, whether the need to obtain signed parental consent left some children out of the study. In the section about limitations and constraints on generality (p. 11), the authors mention as one of the limitations that the survey was conducted in only one state and, hence, cannot be generalised to Latinix hired child farmworkers population in other states. However, considering the use of the non-probability sample, I expected authors to also warn readers that due to the non-probability sampling, one should be very careful about generalising the results of the descriptive analysis to the whole population of Latinix hired child farmworkers of North Carolina as well.

I am not suggesting a complete rewrite of the methods, results and discussion section, but I strongly recommend adding a sentence or two here and there, about the limitations and potential bias in the non-probability sample and revising the presentation of the results. Considering that it would be nearly mission-impossible to have a random sample of the target group of this paper, I believe the paper can be considered for publication if the authors recognise in their paper the limitations of their sample.

Author Response

Please see attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I appreciate the authors revising this manuscript. I have a few remaining concerns regarding the newly added text, which is quoted at the start of each comment.

1.     Lines 52-57: Please revise grammatically to clarify that awareness of societal inequality is considered a civic attitude; right now, it reads as separate. Did the cited studies include prospective designs such that beliefs truly predicted behavior, or were they cross-sectional? If so, please curtail the language. Also please separate the citations for connectedness versus awareness of inequality.

2.     “There is a precedent in the literature on civic engagement for perceived fairness and belief that one can make a difference being considered important civic attitudes (Ballard, Flanagan, Plummer, Wray-Lake, etc.). In this revision, we added explanation and foreshadowing that these are distinct constructs and citing their use as civic attitudes. In recent literature, scholars discuss “fair society beliefs” as “awareness of societal inequalities” so we also discuss this point.”
Because the authors continue to group this with civic attitudes, please justify this decision by providing citations in the manuscript that also characterize them as civic attitudes and clarify prior precedent.

3.     Lines 385-390: Is it reasonable that exposure to injustice would motivate civic action in this sample given that belief in a fair society was not correlated with civic behavior? Are there other factors that might explain discrepant findings? Additionally, as I previously asked, based on these findings how can we encourage youth to become civically engaged based on these findings?

4.     Lines 464-468: What attitudes and behaviors would this include? Is qualitative or ethnographic work needed to asses this?

5.     “We have added material to expand on the implications of limitations (e.g., recruitment strategy and limits to generalizability).”
Please explain implications of the state context for the findings and why this is a limitation. Would associations be expected to differ in a state with a relatively older Latinx population or with a different social context for Latinx child farmworkers?   

Author Response

Please see attached. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for taking my recommendations into account. I am content with the changes that you made and I believe that your paper is ready to be published now.

Author Response

Thank you for this second review.