Abstract Disability is not uncommon among older Asian Americans and varies across subgroups, yet little is known about how functional limitation status is associated with healthy time use. Drawing on the disablement process and the disability‐as‐inequality framework, this study examines how healthy time use varies by functional limitation status and ethnicity among six subgroups of midlife and older Asian Americans. Pooled cross‐sectional data from the 2013–2023 American Time Use Survey were analyzed for six groups of Asian Americans aged 45 and older ( N = 2515). Measures of healthy time use were constructed from health‐promoting activities, time spent with social ties, and activity locations. Ordinary least squares models were estimated with heteroskedasticity‐robust standard errors, adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics. When Asian Americans were analyzed as a single group, functional limitations were associated only with more sleep. However, disaggregated analyses of Asian Americans with functional limitations found subgroup heterogeneity, most clearly in time spent alone and place‐based time use. Filipino and Vietnamese individuals spent more time alone than Asian Indian and Japanese individuals. Place‐based differences were especially pronounced: Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese individuals generally spent more time at home than Chinese and Asian Indian individuals, whereas Vietnamese and, to a lesser extent, Filipino individuals spent less time in public places than several other groups. Heterogeneity in time with kin was more limited, with only Korean and Japanese individuals spending more time with kin than Vietnamese individuals. Activity‐based heterogeneity was also selective: Vietnamese individuals spent less social and leisure time than Japanese, Filipino, and Asian Indian individuals, while Koreans spent more time exercising than Japanese and Vietnamese individuals. For routine time use and sleep time, there were no clear subgroup differences. Thus, functional limitations were associated with time use differently across Asian American subgroups, and among those with functional limitations, subgroup differences in time use were more visible in some domains. The findings highlight the need for group‐specific aging and disability supports that consider how daily time use varies by functional limitation status across activities, relationships, and locations.
Abstract Older Asian Americans are the fastest‐growing segment of the US aging population, with a majority of them being foreign‐born and underserved by formal services. Existing scholarship largely draws on the health behavior model and the immigrant assimilation literature to explain this underutilization, treating service access as an individual decision shaped by help‐seekers’ characteristics, resources, and cultural preferences. While this demand‐side approach identifies important barriers, it leaves unexamined how frontline service workers regulate access and how broader institutional forces shape their discretionary decisions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2022 in the Greater Boston Chinese immigrant community, I argue that service access is stratified through workers’ gatekeeping organized around two competing deservingness frames. Within the aging‐healthcare system, workers enact a medicalized vulnerability frame that positions older immigrants as at‐risk populations deserving of proactive care. In the immigration‐welfare system, workers employ a citizenship performance frame that evaluates claimants based on evidence of integration and compliance. These competing frames are produced through the interaction of macro‐level policies, meso‐level organizational factors and professional norms, and micro‐level interpersonal comparisons. Their coexistence generates contradictory expectations for claimants and stratifies access to services depending on how closely individuals align with institutionally constructed ideals of deserving recipients. By shifting analytical attention from individual help‐seeking to institutional gatekeeping, this article demonstrates how moral evaluations embedded in service systems reproduce inequalities and stratify access to care among older immigrants.
Abstract Drawing on nationally representative data from the decennial census and the American Community Survey, this study documents the trends and patterns of Asian American grandparents living with and raising grandchildren between 2000 and 2023 for the six largest ethnic groups of the Asian American population: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Filipino, and Vietnamese. Overall, the percentage of people aged 50 or older who were coresident grandparents ranged from about 3% to 15% over time, but the prevalence of custodial grandparents varied approximately between 0.5% and 3.5%. Indian, Filipino, and Vietnamese Americans were much more likely to be coresident or custodial grandparents than their Japanese and Korean counterparts throughout the entire period of 2000–2023, while Chinese Americans were ranked in the middle. Multinomial logit models and seemingly unrelated regression analyses showed substantial ethnic differences in the associations of demographic, socioeconomic status, nativity, acculturation, and disability characteristics with the likelihood of being coresident or custodial grandparents across different Asian American ethnic groups. These findings underscore the need for culturally informed policies and programs that address both ethnic‐specific caregiving contexts and the shared structural barriers that shape the caregiving realities of Asian American grandparents today.
Abstract In this conceptual paper, we chart a call to action for scholar‐activists on critical consciousness among queer and gender‐diverse children and youth by introducing two emergent, empirically grounded concepts: fragmentation and manufactured ambivalence . We contend in the white‐capitalist‐cis/heterosexist‐ patriarchal U.S., interconnected structures of oppression create and maintain falsely singular master narratives to prevent the building of solidarities. These seemingly singular narratives inculcate fragmentation —the psychological experience that if one is situated at one or more dominant default socio‐structural axes (e.g., Whiteness, nationality, cisgender identity, etc.) they are automatically removed/absolved from reflection and action around oppression on minoritized axes. We discuss how scholar‐activists and those looking to work with queer and trans children and youth must create consciousness‐raising systems to do the work of defragmentation, while also addressing manufactured ambivalence —a paradoxical emotional response of being simultaneously critically reflective and skeptical that critical action can produce meaningful structural change.
Abstract Childhood in Norwegian schools is increasingly shaped by digitalization, framed in public discourse as both a risk and a necessity. Policy promotes digital competence as a basic skill, and digital technologies in classrooms form part of socio‐material practices that negotiate tensions between neoliberal individualization and Nordic welfare ideals of equity and collectivity. This study examines how learner positions in everyday classroom practices participate in the enactment of multiple childhoods, and how such enactments materialize broader societal struggles over autonomy, responsibility, and collectivity in Norwegian education. Using a relational ontological approach, we conducted a focused ethnography in a 5th‐grade Norwegian classroom. Data included two days of video‐recorded lessons and four semi‐structured focus group interviews with teachers and students. Analysis traced how assemblages of students, teachers, curriculum, digital technologies, and spatial arrangements participate in enacting learner positions and multiple childhoods. We found that learners were enacted in two dominant but intertwined ways: as autonomous individuals responsible for self‐regulated progress and as collaborative participants in collective practices. Digital technologies, work plans, and seating arrangements often scripted individualized learning, yet peer interactions and spatial configurations enabled moments of shared engagement. These enactments reflect contested ideals of childhood and education, revealing how neoliberal logics and welfare‐state values coexist and collide in everyday schooling. Childhoods in digitalized classrooms emerge as relational and fluid, enacted through socio‐material practices that negotiate competing norms of individualization and collectivity. Attending to the micro‐politics of the classroom challenges binary debates on technology and learning and illuminates how educational practices reproduce societal hierarchies of autonomy, accountability, and collectivity.
