UC Irvine

Siblings are an integral part of family life, with 8 in 10 children growing up with a sibling and siblings being important sources of support over the life course. Yet, sibling relationships remain critically overlooked in social inequality research. How do siblings generate and transmit educational resources, and how are these exchanges negotiated across race/ethnicity, social class, and gender? This dissertation addresses these research questions by drawing on 68 semi-structured interviews with Latine and Asian American college students and 28 of their siblings. In the first chapter, I show how Latine and Asian American families similarly cultivate sibling educational support through a process I term reinforced familial support that involves (1) parents’ facilitation of sibling help-seeking and (2) siblings’ educational support as a means of promoting intragenerational mobility. Despite similarities, differences emerge in how Latine and Asian American students frame future negotiations of sibling educational support. In the second chapter, I show how social class shapes sibling educational support in Asian American families with continuing-generation siblings serving as “discretionary supporters” and first-generation college siblings functioning as “cultural guides.” Finally, in the third chapter, I examine how gender and sibling structure shape negotiations of sibling educational carework among Latine first-generation college sibling groups. I show how gendered expectations and birth order scripts relegate educational carework primarily to firstborn Latina sisters. Taken together, this dissertation illuminates how overlooked family members—siblings—contribute to processes of intragenerational mobility and how these exchanges are negotiated within families across race/ethnicity, social class, and gender lines.