Left to right, research assistant Eliane Rubenstein-Avila, co-director of the Harvard Immigration Project Carola Suárez-Orozco, and research assistants Charlene Desir, Alex Cantave, Jeanette Adames, and Mariela Paez. Photo by June Carolyn Erlick.

A refrigerator is the most important thing in life, the 10-year-old immigrant child reported matter-of-factly.

And even though children most frequently responded with answers like "education" and "family" in a sentence-completion exercise about "the most important thing in life," Harvard Immigration Project research assistant Charlene Desir was saddened and intrigued by the boy's answer.

"When a child tells you that, it's like the experience of being poor really comes alive," she told some of her fellow research assistants in a recent roundtable discussion.

Desir and the three other roundtable participants are just a few of the 27 research assistants on both coasts of the United States working with Harvard Immigration Project co-directors Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, professor of education at the Graduate School of Education, and Carola Suárez-Orozco, research associate and lecturer at the School, on a five-year study that is tracking the adaptation experiences of five different groups of first-generation immigrant adolescents between the ages of 10 and 14.

Now in its second year, this ambitious project, officially titled Longitudinal Immigration Student Adaptation Project, is researching the psychosocial development and acculturation of 425 adolescents who represent the major groups of immigrants arriving in the United States today: Dominican, Haitian, Central American, Mexican, and Chinese.

The bilingual researchers are looking at homes, visiting schools, and interviewing children, parents, and teachers. They are trying to understand the immigrant child's cultural context as well as the child's place in society in general. The process is an intimate one -- sharing lives and stories and hopes and frustrations. Many of the researchers are, like the children, immigrants themselves.

Boston-area researchers -- a Haitian school psychologist, a Brazilian teacher, a Puerto Rican linguist, a Dominican social worker, and a Haitian academic program director -- got together at this recent roundtable to discuss some of their observations and their motives for becoming involved in the project.

"What drew me to this project was not only my interest in immigrant children and their families, but the fact that it's one- of-a-kind," said researcher Mariela Paez, who grew up in Puerto Rico. "It's the first of a kind too. There hasn't been any longitudinal work that looks at different groups of immigrant children." Paez became involved with immigrant children and their families through her work in linguistics and language development.

"I was fascinated by the process of learning two languages and what being bilingual had to say about cognitive development," she explained. "Soon before graduating, I realized I was missing the entire thing. I was looking at children's nouns and pronouns, but it was really much more than linguistics: it was about the context, the family, the culture." Paez went on to study child development at Tufts, and then came to Harvard to study under Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, who shares her interest in looking at education from psychological, anthropological, and sociological viewpoints.

Researcher Alix Cantave, director of the Haitian Studies Association, saw the project as a way to understand more about his community, "One of the difficulties has been the lack of data on immigrant children, specifically the Haitian population in the United States -- and in Massachusetts and Boston in particular. This study is a way of at least beginning to get some baseline data about immigrant children and their level of adaptation to the society. I see the need for data, more scientific data."

Like the others, Eliane Rubenstein-Avila found that her own cross-cultural experience sensitized her to the concerns of immigrant children. Her parents immigrated to Brazil before she was born. After her birth the family moved to Israel, and then Rubenstein-Avila came to the United States by herself in her early 20s. She also considers a move she made from California to Cambridge a quasi- immigration. "So there's a whole lot of immigration experience there," she jokes.

And yet, there were many surprises. One was that in the new immigrant groups Rubenstein-Avila is researching, many families are separated for long periods of time. Then, there's the whole question of how the groups are perceived, an issue that almost all the researchers raised.

"On the West Coast, they think of immigrants as people who come here to work real hard. Even people who were against immigrants thought they came here to work real hard," she observed. "On the East Coast, it's more loaded in terms of immigrants being thought of as usurpers of the system, of using services and so forth."

Jeanette Adames, a Dominican social worker, nods her head, "I was born in the States, but I didn't come to study here until I was 11 years old. I can relate so much to what I am hearing from the kids, what it's like to be in a classroom when you look different, that's something that I've experienced to a certain degree. I don't look at school and the relationship with school in the same way mainstream Americans do."

Children sometimes are seen negatively by teachers, even when they are of the same ethnic background. The teachers can be overburdened, forced to teach on several different levels at once, ill- prepared and stressed, or just culturally insensitive, researchers said.

"I remember the case of one kid," recounts Cantave. "She was standing by the principal's office, and the teacher walked by, and says, 'Well, she's a bad kid,' so this girl bursts into tears. She's new to the country, she's living with a family she's just exposed to for the first time, and she's just this little girl, all by herself. The teacher wasn't trying to understand, she's just reinforcing in the kid's mind that she's a bad girl. The poor child was in tears. That's how her day began."

In another sentence-completion exercise, many students declared that they were perceived negatively by Americans, using strong words like "garbage" and "trash." Many of them have had to deal with violence in their own countries and now experience violence in their new cities.

Yet, for many of the children, school in their home country was an escape from the streets, a privileged and orderly place where rules had to be followed. Here, the American informality in the classroom obscures the separation of the school from the community. Many of the parents of immigrant children have never been inside a child's school. Sometimes they are working too hard at multiple jobs, the school is often far from their neighborhood, and they are fearful about their lack of English.

"School is kind of a first introduction for immigrant children to adapt in the greater society," observes Desir. "As the kids go further in their education, there's a kind of disconnect."

The Suárez-Orozcos and their cadre of research assistants are trying to understand the nature of that "disconnect." They say that the idea that immigrants assimilate naturally to participate in a mythical "national destiny" is now challenged by the complexities of the new immigrant experience in the United States. While some immigrant children do brilliantly in schools, the school performance of many others actually worsens the longer they stay in the United States. Far from fulfilling the American Dream, many successive generations of youths from immigrant backgrounds are performing more poorly than their foreign-born, first-generation peers.

The researchers are learning from their subjects, and hope the children can also benefit, not only from future findings, but from the experience itself.

"Most important to me," explains Desir, "is the fact that I work with these students and that I work with these families, gaining their experience. We're coming in and we're saying to these students, I want to learn from you, I want you to explain to me what you go through. We're reaching out to the parents and saying, your voice counts, we want to learn from you, we want you to tell us how to service your child. I think that is the most important part of the project for me, validating who these children are."

Adds Adames, "I'm glad that Marcelo and Carola have approached the project, not just from the perspective of gathering data, but from that of teaching us to be better researchers. That's reflected in our training and in our weekly meetings. Marcelo and Carola are two people who validate not only the voices of the participants, but it's amazing how they validate us; each one of us brings very different skills to this project, as the result of our personalities, our experiences, our schooling. They are able to touch the best of everyone."