Environmentalism Among Vulnerable Youth: An Examination of Self-Efficacy for Environmental Action Among Latinx Child Farmworkers

INTRODUCTION

Environmental racism and injustice, and their resulting extensive environmental exposures and health impacts, are rampant for young people living in rural, minority communities. ¹ These include young people who live in farmworker communities, rural communities in which many of the residents are employed as migrant and seasonal farmworkers. ² Farmworker youth are overwhelmingly Latinx. ³ They generally live in substandard housing ⁴ located in isolated neighborhoods with few amenities. ⁵ They are exposed to numerous environmental hazards at home ⁶ and at work. ⁷ These exposures include dilapidated and crowded housing, residential and occupational pesticide application, contaminated water, sun and heat, mechanical hazards, and zoonotic disease hazards. These exposures can have substantial effects on their health due to their developmental status. ⁸

This added to the environmental exposures experienced by Latinx youth living in rural agricultural communities is the situation that some of these youth, as young as 10 years of age, are legally hired to work on farms. ⁹ The U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division ¹⁰ rules state that a child aged 10 or 11 years can hold any nonhazardous farm job outside of school hours with parental permission when Fair Labor Standard Act minimum wage requirements do not apply (i.e., on small farms). A child aged 12 or 13 years can hold any nonhazardous farm job outside school hours with parental permission or on the same farm on which a parent is working. A child aged 14 or 15 years can hold any nonhazardous farm job outside school hours, without parental permission. A child aged 16 years or older can hold any farm job, hazardous or not, with unlimited work hours. Agriculture is unique among U.S. industries in allowing such broad child labor. This situation is a legacy of a compromise by the Roosevelt Administration with Southern legislators to get support for worker protections in other industries by sacrificing protections for Black sharecroppers and their children. ¹¹

Developing environmentalism and environmental action of youth from vulnerable communities is crucial for engaging these youth in the processes and structures to improve their environment (i.e., reduce and remove environmental hazards, ensure environmental equity, address and remediate health effects of environmental exposures). Wilson and Snell ¹² note that when governmental structures at the international, national, state, and local levels construct environmental policy and practice, they seldom consider the concerns and perspectives of the vulnerable communities most affected by environmental exposures.

Little is known about environmental self-efficacy among youth living in vulnerable communities. Self-efficacy is the belief that one has the capacity to attain specific goals; it reflects the individual's confidence that she or he can exert control over oneself and one's environment. ¹³ Environmental self-efficacy is a necessary factor for youth living in vulnerable communities to effect environmental change. However, few investigations have delineated the environmental perspective of vulnerable youth. ¹⁴ Wilson and Snell ¹⁵ used a focus group approach with socially disadvantaged young people (under age 18) in the United Kingdom. They found that these young people had substantial pro-environmental views and understood environmental issues, although they often did not use the terms generally applied to environmental concepts. Teixeira and Zuberi ¹⁶ used an ethnographic approach to document that urban, disadvantaged Black youth aged 14–19 years living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, understand that environmental disparities in their neighborhoods result from a combination of social (race, poverty, crime) and physical (neighborhood disorder, housing abandonment) environmental factors. Postma and colleagues ¹⁷ used a photovoice approach to document concerns about the social environment among Latinx middle school students living in a Washington State agricultural community. Three themes were apparent among these students: lack of structured youth activities, poverty and stress, and benefits and detriments of agricultural work. This analysis was focused on how to use photovoice as a method, and it provided little detail about the themes. Brickle and Evans-Agnew ¹⁸ found that a photovoice intervention among youth living in the Pacific Northwest increased their feelings of empowerment to address wood smoke pollution.

Each of these studies used a qualitative approach for delineating youth participants' perceptions of environmental action. Each provides important insights into their environmental knowledge and actions. Within a community-based participatory research (CBPR) program, the current analysis uses a validated measure of self-efficacy for environmental action to address two aims. The first aim is to document the self-efficacy for environmental action of Latinx child farmworkers—youth who are part of a vulnerable community. The second aim is to delineate the factors associated with self-efficacy for environmental action among these Latinx child farmworkers.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The Child Farmworker Study is a CBPR study ¹⁹ examining the effects of farm work on the health and development of Latinx child farmworkers in North Carolina. Collaborators include investigators at Wake Forest School of Medicine, Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF), and East Carolina University. The research team includes youth co-investigators and is informed by a child farmworker advisory committee consisting of members of the Levante Leadership Institute. ²⁰ A professional advisory committee that includes representatives from the North Carolina (NC) Farmworker Health Program, NC Justice Center, Toxic Free NC, NC Migrant Education Program, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, and North Carolina Focus on Increasing Education Leadership and Dignity (NC FIELD) also advises the project investigators. Arcury and colleagues ²¹ present a detailed discussion of the overall study design, participant recruitment, and data collection procedures. The project recruited participants in 2017, with follow-up interviews in 2018 and 2019. The Wake Forest University School of Medicine Institutional Review Board approved the research protocol and procedures.

RESULTS

Participants included girls (37.3%) and boys (62.7%) (Table 1). Most (82.8%) were born in the United States, and most (87.0%) preferred to be interviewed in English. A small number (16%) were migrant farmworkers. When they completed the Self-Efficacy for Environmental Action Scale, 12.4% were age 13 years or younger, 29.0% were aged 14 or 15, and 58.6% were aged 16 years or older. Educational attainment for 21.9% of the participants was some elementary or middle school, for 59.2% was some high school, and for 18.9% was completed high school.

The values for the Self-Efficacy for Environmental Action Scale had a range of 2 to 5, and a mean of 3.83 (SD 0.48) for these Latinx child farmworkers. The majority of the participants agreed with the positive statements, indicating that they could take actions that would affect their environment, and disagreed with the negative statement indicating that they could not affect their environment (Table 2). For example, 63.9% agreed with the statement, “I feel confident in my ability to help protect the planet,” whereas 62.1% disagreed with the statement, “I don't think I can make any difference in solving environmental problems.”

Two personal characteristics were significantly associated with the Self-Efficacy for Environmental Action Scale (Table 3). Girls had a higher score than boys (3.95 vs. 3.77; p = 0.01. Each year of educational attainment was associated with a 0.05 increase in the score (p = 0.03). Other characteristics not significantly associated with self-efficacy for environmental action included whether born in the United States, preferred English when interviewed, migrant worker, and age.

DISCUSSION

The rural, Latinx young people who participated in The Child Farmworker Study live in agricultural communities and work on farms where they are exposed to significant environmental and occupational hazards. ³¹ They attend schools that frequently are not supportive of their needs. ³² However, they have a strong conception of their ability to affect environmental change.

These rural Latinx child farmworkers are comparable in self-efficacy for environmental action (mean of 3.83) to other populations for which this measure has been used. In an analysis of adult citizen scientists, Lynch et al. ³³ report that the mean pre-test score for their intervention group of citizen scientists was 4.25, whereas the mean pre-test score for a control group was 3.91. In a different adult citizen science project, Hsu et al. ³⁴ report a pre-test mean of 3.5. These Latinx child farmworkers had a similar positive sense of environmentalism compared with that reported for children from other vulnerable populations using qualitative methods. ³⁵

This analysis used a general scale to measure environmental self-efficacy. Little research has examined the environmental attitudes, perspectives, or self-efficacy of children living in vulnerable communities. ³⁶ The use of this general scale provides a first step toward understanding the perspectives of Latinx children living in farmworker families. The scale was developed by a reputable organization—the Cornell Ornithology Laboratory, Citizen Science Program. It provides some comparable data. ³⁷ Although the scale has not been widely used, and it was intended to measure changes in environmental self-efficacy due to participation in citizen science programs, it proved adaptable to this project's needs. Given the lack of significant variation by age and strong Cronbach's alpha, the scale items appear to have been equally understood by the project's young participants across a wide age-range. The use of the general scale was approved by the youth co-investigators and youth advisory committee. ³⁸ Future research should adapt this or other appropriate scales for the specific contexts of children living in vulnerable communities.

The strong sense of self-efficacy in this vulnerable group of Latinx child farmworkers indicates the potential for environmental action. Environmental self-efficacy is a necessary, though insufficient characteristic that can enable youth living in vulnerable communities to work for environmental change. Without self-efficacy, these youth may not see that they have the power to demand and to work for policy that can improve their living and working environments.

Educational attainment is the one factor significantly associated with level of environmental self-efficacy that can be addressed programmatically. Efforts are needed to engage these child farmworkers, as well as children in other vulnerable communities in environmental action through community education. ³⁹ If environmental action is based on poor information, it will be transitory. ⁴⁰

Programs addressing environmental health literacy research and intervention indicate promising potential for improving environmental justice by involving youth in vulnerable communities. Similar to The Child Farmworker Study, these projects argue for the importance of a community engaged and participatory approach to engage fully vulnerable youth in environmental learning and advocacy. ⁴¹ By addressing environmental health concerns that vulnerable youth are actually experiencing, such as air pollution ⁴² and rainwater harvesting and contamination, ⁴³ and allowing them the hands-on research experience, they build environmental knowledge and then learn leadership skills to address environmental injustice in their communities.

Although this analysis is novel in its focus on rural, Latinx farmworker youth, and in its use of an established measure of environmental self-efficacy, it should be interpreted in light of its limitations. Caution must be taken in generalizing results because the sample is small and non-random, and from a single state. This analysis is limited to investigating environmental self-efficacy. It is part of a larger project examining the effects of agricultural work on the health and development of child Latinx farmworkers; ⁴⁴ environmental self-efficacy was not a component of the original study design. The Self-Efficacy for Environmental Action Scale was added into the project, because environmental justice became an apparent issue. Therefore, other measures for a detailed analysis of environmental behavior were not included. Participation entailed multiple data collection activities, with the completion of long interview questionnaires, over several years. The inclusion of additional measures of environmental behavior may have increased participant burden and decreased participation.

CONCLUSION

Research on the environmental attitudes and action of youth living in vulnerable communities is essential to developing a program of environmental justice in rural, vulnerable communities. The results reported in this analysis show that Latinx child farmworkers living in rural North Carolina communities have a strong sense of environmental self-efficacy. Further research is needed to develop our knowledge of environmentalism among Latinx youth.

Organizations supporting the development of Latinx youth should incorporate issues of environmental justice into their programs. Fortunately, North Carolina has a strong history of environmental justice research and advocacy. The term environmental justice was first used in North Carolina as part of the effort to stop the development of a toxic landfill in Warren County during the 1980s. ⁴⁵ Addressing environmental justice for rural communities has continued with the work of such organizations as The Concerned Citizens of Tillery and the West End Revitalization Association.

Two organizations work directly with Latinx child farmworkers to develop leadership in developing environmental justice (Student Action with Farmworkers [SAF] and NC FIELD). The Child Farmworker Study is working through the North Carolina Farmworker Advocacy Network to ensure study results are available that inform programs and support policy initiatives.