Family Belongingness, Gang Friendships, and Psychological Distress in Adolescent Achievement

Urban middle school youth, especially racial and ethnic minority youth, face myriad challenges in obtaining strong academic outcomes. Students in large urban areas often perform more poorly compared with their suburban counterparts (Belfiore, Auld, & Lee, 2005). This performance gap especially concerns members of racial and ethnic minority groups (Mattison & Aber, 2007; Ou & Reynolds, 2008). Poor academic outcomes early in life can affect the quality of later life. Low educational achievement is associated with unemployment, lower earnings, higher crime, and greater dependency on welfare and other social services (Holcomb-McCoy, 2007). Furthermore, early adolescents commonly face changes in relationships in both school and family environments. This often increases emotional stress and puts adolescents' academic performance at risk at a time when the long-term implications of academic performance increase (Burchinal, Roberts, Zeisel, & Rowley, 2008; Hill & Tyson, 2009). There is a need to better understand which factors are related to low academic achievement in racially and ethnically diverse urban middle school students; thus, we investigated relationships among social, psychological, and academic functioning of ethnically diverse urban youth. Emotional distress, commonly reflected by depression and anger, is often correlated with poor outcomes for youth--socially, psychologically, and academically. Dixon, Scheidegger, and McWhirter (2009) found that adolescents who do not believe that they matter to others tend to have higher levels of depression. Dixon et al. further hypothesized that these feelings in youth can make developmentally appropriate tasks, such as building a healthy sense of belongingness and a social identity, more challenging. Ashby, Dickinson, Gnilka, and Noble (2011) found in middle school students a significant relationship between high levels of depression and low levels of hope. Furthermore, adolescent depression was significantly and negatively related to school performance and is associated with subsequent poor academic and career outcomes (Frojd et al., 2008). The association between depression and poor academic achievement was detected using self-report measures of grade point average (GPA) and other school performance (Kaltiala-Heino, Rimpela, & Rantanen, 1998). In short, depression appears to have a salient negative impact on outcomes for youth. Depression and anger, often concomitant in adolescence and childhood, reveal symptoms of each that overlap. Researchers (Burke & Loeber, 2010; Goodwin, 2006; Keenan et al., 2011; Ofonedu, Percy, Harris-Britt, & Belcher, 2012) have indicated an association between anger and depression in youth. According to Farmer (2002), who conducted qualitative research with adolescents who met diagnostic criteria for a depressive disorder, adolescents who reported being depressed claimed that anger was the most frequent and persistent emotion that they experienced. Furthermore, high levels of anger are associated with internal turmoil and distress that can significantly affect educational and vocational outcomes (Deffenbacher, Lynch, Oetting, & Kemper, 1996). Consequently, because of the co-occurrence and overlap of depressive and anger symptoms, as well as their prevalence, psychological distress is effectively marked by symptoms of both depression and anger. Developmental contextual theory (DCT; Lerner, 2002) describes the interrelationship of constructs in youth. This theory provides a framework for conceptualizing youth's experiences, as well as the precipitants of social and psychological distress and academic performance. DCT encompasses an active and reciprocal relationship between individual achievement, internal distress, and environmental social factors (Lerner, 2002). According to DCT, a youth is not separate from the environment, nor does the environment unilaterally control the individual. Instead, there is a dynamic interrelationship, in which events from the environment are interpreted and acted upon by the individual, who then influences the environment, in a continuous and reciprocal pattern of interactions. …