Neighborhood Structural Characteristics and U.S. Mexican-origin Adolescents’ Adaptive and Maladaptive Functioning

• In Event: 3-174 - The Role of Neighborhood Context in Shaping Diverse Youth Development

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Ethnic-racial and socioeconomic residential segregation are endemic in the United States and represent inhibiting stratification processes with implications for adolescent development (García Coll et al., 1996). For example, higher levels of neighborhood concentrated poverty are associated with higher levels of adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems (Leventhal et al., 2009). Considered alongside marginalized communities’ abilities to respond to stratification in ways that mitigate maladaptation and promote competencies (e.g., Hughes et al., 2006), however, it is likely that residence in stratified neighborhoods can also have promoting influences. For example, compared to their counterparts living in neighborhoods predominated by non-Latino Whites, adolescents from marginalized ethnic-racial groups living in neighborhoods with greater concentrations of their ethnic-racial group experienced fewer internalizing problems (Hurd et al., 2012) and less discrimination from peers (White et al., 2015).

Comprehensive longitudinal research examining the implications of neighborhood structural characteristics for a range of adolescents’ developmentally and culturally salient outcomes – including internalizing, externalizing, prosocial behaviors, and ethnic-racial identity resolution – can illuminate nuances associated with neighborhood promoting and inhibiting effects. Additionally, prior work highlights three proximal processes that may help to explain how and why neighborhood socioeconomic and ethnic-racial structural characteristics matter for development among adolescents from ethnic-racial minority groups. These include proximal processes that occur as adolescents engage and participate in their ethnic-racial, peer, and school communities (Rogoff, 2003), like exploring their ethnic-racial identities, experiencing discrimination from peers, and developing a sense of school attachment.

Hypotheses: We hypothesized early adolescents’ levels of neighborhood Latino concentration and neighborhood concentrated poverty would have (promoting or inhibiting) implications for the development of internalizing behaviors, externalizing behaviors, ethnic-racial identity resolution, and prosocial behaviors during late adolescence via influences on middle-adolescent experiences of discrimination from peers, ethnic-racial identity exploration, and school attachment (Figure 1).

Study sample: We tested hypotheses among a sample of 733 U.S. Mexican adolescents (48.8% female; 29.8% born in Mexico) followed from 7th, to 10th, and 12th grades.

Method: Hypothesized mediational mechanisms were tested prospectively using Mplus 7.2 (Muthén & Muthén, 2010) with auxiliary variables and covariates. Data on neighborhood Latino concentration and concentrated poverty were from the census bureau. We used established scales to measure ethnic-racial identity exploration and resolution (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2004), discrimination from peers (Delgado et al., 2011), school attachment (Gonzales et al., 2012), internalizing and externalizing symptoms (Shaffer et al., 2000), and prosocial behaviors (Carlo et al., 2010). For all congeneric measures, alphas were ≥ .73 at all waves.

Results and Discussion: See Figure 2. Higher neighborhood Latino concentration during early adolescence predicted greater school attachment and ethnic-racial identity exploration and lower discrimination from peers in middle adolescence. These benefits, in turn, were associated with lower externalizing and internalizing and higher ethnic-racial identity resolution and prosocial behaviors in late adolescence. Findings are discussed relative to understanding the ways in which neighborhoods work to influence adolescent development. We also discuss the importance of expanding the range of developmental competencies – to include normative identity and moral development – examined relative to neighborhood structural characteristics.

Authors

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

• Katharine H. Zeiders, University of Arizona
  Non-Presenting Author

• M. Dalal Safa, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author