Department of Family Therapy Dissertations and Applied Clinical Projects

Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Dissertation - NSU Access Only

Degree Name

Doctor of Marriage and Family Therapy (DMFT)

Advisor

Ronald Chenail

Abstract

There are over 700,000 Venezuelan immigrants in the United States (Muñoz-Pogossian & Winkler, 2023), and 53% of them who are 25 and older are well educated, having at least a bachelor’s degree (Moslimani et al., 2023). Much has been studied around the college choice process for Latinx families in the United States and the challenges they face (e.g., Alvarez, 2010, 2015; Ceja, 2004; Hernández, 2015; Jabbar et al., 2019; Kimaya, 2011; Martinez, 2013; Olivarez et al., 2024; Pérez & McDonough, 2008; Sy & Romero, 2008), but there are no studies about the Venezuelan population. This applied clinical project aimed to study the lived experiences of six (N = 6) well-educated Venezuelan parents who immigrated to the United States and had already gone through the process of supporting their first-generation immigrant child apply to college in the United States. The present phenomenological study sought to understand these experiences by answering the following research question: What are Venezuelan parents’ experiences supporting their first-generation immigrant children in applying to college? I used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore the voices of the Venezuelan parents and gather meanings attributed to their experiences. The results expand the knowledge about Venezuelan parents in the United States providing valuable insights for the future development of tailored psychoeducational and emotional support programs. These programs would be developed within the marriage and family therapy field to assist this growing demographic in their role of supporting first-generation immigrant students through the college application process in the United States. Keywords: Venezuelan parents, immigrant students, college

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