Mexican-American young adults’ mental health relative to chronic adverse stressor transitions from childhood to adolescence

• In Event: 3-068 - The Pervasiveness of Stress and Adversity in the Lives of Today's U.S. Latino/a Adolescents

Integrative Statement

From childhood through adolescence family, peer, and community environments are salient aspects of developmental niches that vary on chronic stress exposures (Super & Harkness, 1986). Chronic adverse stressors include conditions of threat, demand, or constraints that are open-ended, recurring, and part of daily life (Wheaton, 1999). These can be sustained and cumulative, resulting in maladjustment (Zeiders et al., 2016). Though U.S. Mexicans are disproportionately exposed to stressors (Camacho-Thompson et al., 2016), there is variability in exposures to family conflict, peer conflict, ethnic discrimination from peers, and language hassles (Bellmore et al., 2012; Nair et al., 2013).

Although research documents implications of chronic adverse stressors for internalizing and externalizing problems, this body of work has gaps. First, much of it examines family, peer, or community stressors individually and with less attention to culturally salient stressors (e.g., language hassles) experienced by U.S. Mexican adolescents. Second, despite some longitudinal work (Zeiders et al., 2016), transitions into and out of high stressors are examined rarely. These gaps raise questions about the importance of developmental timing of chronic adverse stressors and the effectiveness of intervention efforts and policies to alleviate them.

We sought to (1) describe latent transitions in developmentally and culturally salient chronic adverse stressors from late childhood to late adolescence and (2) examine whether different transitions predicted early adult internalizing and externalizing problems.

Methods: Data from 4 waves (5th, 7th, 10th, 12th grades) of a study of 749 Mexican-origin youth (Mean age at wave 1 = 10.9 (SD = .46), 49% female) support a latent transition analysis (LTA) of chronic adverse family, peer, and community stressors. We measured distal outcomes 5 years after wave 4.

At Waves 1-4, we measured chronic adverse stressors using established scales for: (a) family conflict (e.g., “members of your family hit or hurt each other”), peer conflict (e.g., “you were pressured against your will to join a gang”), language hassles (e.g., “a teacher put you down for not speaking English or not speaking it well;” Gonzales et al., 2001), and peer discrimination (e.g., “kids at school called you names because you are Mexican American;” Delgado et al., 2011). We measured internalizing and externalizing using the adult self-report (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2003).

Missing data were handled with multiple imputation using SAS. Remaining analyses were conducted in MPlus7. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) were conducted separately for each wave; fit statistics and interpretability were used to determine best models.

Results. For the LCA, two classes emerged at all four waves, representing low and high chronic adverse family, peer, and community stressors (Table 1). The LTA model with two classes at all waves was most appropriate. Six transition classes emerged and related to internalizing and externalizing (Table 2). Consistent with our expectations, some U.S. Mexican youth transitioned into and out of high levels of chronic adverse family, peer, and community stressors.

Discussion. Findings are discussed relative to (a) the developmental salience of these transitions and (b) opportunities to intervene during adolescence to mitigate later mental health problems.

Authors

• Alexandria S. Curlee, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rebecca M. B. White, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Gustavo Carlo, University of Missouri
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jenn Yunn-Tein, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nancy Gonzales, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• George Knight, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author