The Empirical Study of Time Spent Studying for Children of Immigrants in Japan (in Japanese)

This study analyzes the educational achievement of immigrant children in Japan. Since foreign migrants began to enter Japan in large numbers in the early 1990s, their children, or the second generation born or raised in Japan, have largely come of age. A growing number of studies have pointed out various problems associated with the educational achievement of immigrant children, such as parental commitment to education and social networks. Since most of these studies are limited in scale based on qualitative observations of a particular population in a particular region, however, we do not know how immigrant children actually formulated their habits of studying. In this study, we focus on school-aged immigrant children who have resided in Japan for at least ten years and are proficient in the Japanese language. Using data from a unique and nationally representative dataset, the Longitudinal Survey of Babies in the 21st Century, we analyzed the effect of parental commitment to education and social networks on their school performance, measured by the hours spent studying at home, holding other control variables constant. The results suggest that parental commitment to children’s education and support network are indeed important in determining the number of study hours for both foreign and Japanese children. However, once unobserved individual traits are controlled for, such as cultural views and orientation on schooling, motivation, and genetic endowments, parental commitment and support network are no longer crucial. In addition, it is also found that this mechanism to formulate the habit of studying is not unique for migrant children, indicating that it is indifferent from native-Japanese children. JEL Classification Number：I24, J15 Key Words：migrant children, time spent studying, fixed-effects model