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Negotiating Education in an Immigration Context: Qualitative Insights into Age–Grade Mismatch and Family Cultural Capital

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https://doi.org/10.54963/jqre.i46.2309
Zhang, F. (2026). Negotiating Education in an Immigration Context: Qualitative Insights into Age–Grade Mismatch and Family Cultural Capital. Journal of Qualitative Research in Education, (46), 182–199. https://doi.org/10.54963/jqre.i46.2309
Issue 46 (2026): in progress
Copyright (c) 2026 Fengyi Zhang
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Journal of Qualitative Research in Education (ENAD)  publishes accepted manuscripts under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Authors who submit their papers for publication by ENAD agree to have the CC BY 4.0 license applied to their work, and that anyone is allowed to reuse the article or part of it free of charge for any purpose, including commercial use. As long as the author and original source are properly cited, anyone may copy, redistribute, reuse, and transform the content.

Authors

  • Fengyi Zhang

    Division of Advanced Transdisciplinary Science, Utsunomiya University, Utsunomiya 321-8505, Japan

Received: 20 January 2026; Revised: 26 February 2026; Accepted: 16 March 2026; Published: 20 April 2026

This qualitative study explores how immigrant families experience and negotiate age–grade mismatch during school enrolment and transition, and how family cultural capital shapes their ability to engage with school placement decisions. Age grade mismatch (i.e., being below age grade level) can be considered as either a technical or guardian move, but has significant social, emotional, and educational implications. The research is based on semi-structured interviews with 12 immigrant parents and young people regarding the announcement, justification, and reaction to the placement decision-making in the daily interactions of the family and school, the results of which indicate that age–grade incompatibility is widely perceived as an institutional evaluation instead of an objective adaptation, which shapes the sense of belonging, confidence, and peer relationships in children. The ability of families to challenge or make new deals on the placement decisions differed significantly and was largely connected to access to information, language assistance, social networking, and knowledge of school systems. Some families could mobilise these resources to bring about change, but in other cases, the process appeared to be fixed and intimidating. The research points to the ability of language-based tests to blur the previous education and the support systems to propagate inequalities in situations where there are no established ways of review.

Keywords:

Age–Grade Mismatch Immigrant Families School Placement Cultural Capital Educational Inequality School Belonging

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