The Effects of Ethnicity on Adolescent Resilience against Depression

Adolescents (N=6,504) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health participated in a study exploring racial differences in access to resources against depression. Significant results indicated Black adolescents’ advantage on perceived adult and family support, perceived intelligence, self-esteem, active coping skills, and college expectations; Hispanics were advantaged in maternal relationships. White adolescents’ resources were parents’ education, two biological parent households, two parent households, perceived peer support, and survival expectations. Hispanic and Black adolescents were more likely to be on welfare with the former also suffering through unemployment and the latter living with a single mother. Whites were most likely to live with a single father. Future research should investigate the interactions’ potency and apply it to treatment of adolescent depression. The Effects of Ethnicity 3 The Effects of Ethnicity on Adolescent Resilience against Depression According to Gans (1990), nearly half of all adolescents today give an account of experiences regarding stressful situations in their homes and/or within their schools. These stressors include major life changes such as changing schools or losing a loved one, chronically taxing conditions such as poverty or domestic violence, and day to day hassles such as school exams or conflicts with parents and siblings (Compas, 1987). For some adolescents, exposure to such unremitting circumstances can result in physical or psychological difficulties. However, there are some teenagers who seem not to be as negatively affected by these same adverse conditions. This peculiarity piqued the interests of researchers, and the lives of youth became the subject of studies. Originally, the typical perspective employed by researchers was to study the youth who had not coped well with any hardships or obstacles they might have faced in their lifetimes. It was not until the 1970s that researchers shifted from this traditional focus to instead explore how some children and adolescents recovered from otherwise debilitating circumstances (Hurd, 2004). This paradigm shift introduced the study of resilience in children and adolescents and the different possible protective factors that augment said resilience (Howard et al., 1999). The formal advent of resiliency research was accompanied by the many definitions used to depict what exactly one means when resiliency is mentioned. For example, Hauser, Vieyra, Jacobson, and Wertlieb (1985) described it as the capacity of some who are exposed to risk factors to overcome those risks and avoid negative consequences such as delinquency, academic and behavior problems, and physical complications. Vaillant (1993) defined resiliency as “the capacity to be bent without breaking and the capacity, once bent, to spring back” (p. 284). However, Rutter (1990) provided a reminder that resiliency is not a fixed attribute of a child, but rather, a process of coping that is vulnerable to change along with varying life conditions. Such The Effects of Ethnicity 4 stressors include biological (e.g., prenatal exposure to substances with potential for developmental delays), psychological (e.g., maternal depression or other psychopathology), economic (e.g., leading to malnutrition and inadequate health care), and social (e.g., high unemployment and crime in the neighborhood) phenomena (Aronowitz, 2005). New evidence on resiliency is receiving increasing attention because investigators want to find ways to protect young people from the damaging effects of stressful life situations. For example, Kovacs (1997) claimed that the current rapid social change and the associated results of overcrowding cities, family breakup, increased drug use, and shifts in occupational and employment patterns may increase the levels of stress of adolescents across the country. Kovacs implicates these changes as a potential reason for the increase of occurrence of an often debilitating psychological disorder in young people—depression. Depression is actually the most common mental health problem among youth today (Kelder et al., 2001; MacKay, Fingerhut, & Duran, 2000). The long-lasting emotional suffering, everyday life obstacles, and the accompanying heightened threat of suicide and substance abuse make depression in young people a very serious concern (Fombonne, Wostear, Cooper, Harrington, & Rutter, 2001a, 2001b). Therefore, it stands as imperative that any means of protection against strenuous life experiences and their repercussions are identified and explored. Several studies have found the following four broad factors that provide this defense against adversities (Garmezy, Masten, & Tellegen, 1984; Rak & Patterson, 1996). First, personal characteristics include an adolescent’s developmental stage, intellectual capacity, social competence, personal goals, an easy temperament, high self-esteem, and a mastery-oriented approach to new situations. Next, self-concept usually describes a heightened self-understanding, the possession of adaptive skills, and an ability to form close personal relationships. The third The Effects of Ethnicity 5 broad factor revolves around family characteristics that especially include a family environment that provides warmth, closeness, and organization in the child’s life. Finally, social support outside the immediate family typically comes from a grandparent, teacher, mentor, or close friend who develops a special relationship with the child, offering a support system and a positive coping model. With these four broad types of protective factors in mind, researchers have proposed several models of resiliency. These include the compensatory model, the challenge model, the risk-protective model, and finally, the protective-protective model. The compensatory model states that risk and protective factors have an additive effect, with risk factors increasing maladjustment and protective factors decreasing maladjustment. The challenge model describes a curvilinear relationship in which it is actually more beneficial when trying to reduce a negative outcome to be exposed to a small amount of risk rather than face no exposure to it at all. The risk-protective model suggests that protective factors buffer risk factors, which serves to reduce a negative outcome. Finally, the protective-protective model posits a form of cumulative protection—as the number of protective factors increases, the impact of the risk factors on the negative outcome decreases. While having a model that attempts to describe the mechanism(s) underlying a particular psychological stressor proves beneficial in most cases, the differences among the aforementioned models can actually cause confusion and misunderstandings of the research among the researchers themselves. It proves difficult and perplexing to meander through and compare findings that do not share the same theoretical model as their basis. Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becker (2000) stated that cross study variation in definitions of resilience in the adolescent literature reflects a deeper problem within the field of resilience—the lack of a unified theory of resilience capable of guiding more structured and empirically based The Effects of Ethnicity 6 approaches to developing the construct. According to Olsson et al. (2003), considerable confusion arises when the outcome of adaptation and the process of adaptation are used interchangeably to describe resilience. On the one hand, resilience can be defined as an outcome characterized by particular patterns of functional behavior despite risk. Alternatively, resilience also has been defined as a dynamic process of adaptation to a risk setting that involves interaction between a range of risk and protective factors from the individual to the social. Thus, as Luthar et al. noted, the contrasting definitions of resilience generate uncertainty as to how resilience may actually function. Any theoretical account of resilience that does not discriminate between process and outcome may be confusing. In addition to lacking a unified theory, the field of resilience research has had little to say about racial and ethnic differences in coping among youth. This gap in the literature is largely due to the fact that the vast majority of research has been done on U.S. and European White youth (Compas et al., 2001; Rosella, 1994). In one review, among the 53% of studies including race as a variable, non-White adolescents were still underrepresented (Rosella, 1994). The research that has been conducted thus far seems to have largely neglected cross-cultural comparisons. This empirical inattention to possible resilience factors among minority youth is troubling and represents an area of research that has yet to be investigated to its full potential. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the potential existence of differences in an adolescent’s possession of protective factors depending upon his or her race. The likelihood of the appearance and frequency of risk factors in particular ethnicities was also explored. Once the occurrence of these protective factors was discovered, they were then measured against the outcome variable of depression. Mental health problems rank among the biggest adversities that adolescents must face and consequently handle. As previously stated, The Effects of Ethnicity 7 depression is the most common mental health problem among youth today. Depression was identified as especially relevant in the 2001 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance, which found youth in ethnic minorities to be significantly more likely to report symptoms of depression, such as feeling sad and hopeless almost everyday for two weeks. Overall, the prevalence of having felt sad or hopeless almost every day for more than two weeks was higher among Hispanic (35.4%) than white (26.2%) and black (26.3%) students (Grunbaum et al., 2004). These findings make it critical to inves