Promoting Resilience and Reducing Health Disparities: Towards a Shift-and-Persist Intervention - Stark racial/ethnic disparities in chronic disease reflect greater exposure to deleterious contextual stressors, such as low socioeconomic status. Over the life course, these stressors “get under the skin” via maladaptive psychological and behavioral coping and persistent activation of stress response systems, leading to uneven chronic disease burden. By adolescence, contextual stressors can produce the physiological, behavioral, and psychological precursors to chronic conditions among racial/ethnic minority youth. Thus, effective coping skills in adolescence are critical to ameliorating the early signals of chronic disease and pre-empting chronic disease progression. Shift-and-persist (S&P) coping, where one reappraises life stressors (i.e., shifting), while finding meaning and maintaining optimism (i.e., persisting), shows promise as a successful coping strategy to mitigate the early signs of chronic disease among racial/ethnic minority adolescents, yet more investigation is needed prior to designing S&P coping interventions for racial/ethnic minority youth. Using data from Project PISCES, a 6-wave study of adolescents, in combination from data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this project addresses three aims: 1) to understand how socioecological assets predict unique trajectories of S&P coping across adolescence 2) elucidate how the health effects of configurations of contextual stress may vary by distinct trajectories of S&P coping across adolescence and, 3) design and conduct a feasibility study of a digital S&P coping single-session intervention for racial/ethnic minority youth. Findings from this program of research will uncover key factors that contribute to the long-term development of S&P coping, provide further clarity on the responsiveness of S&P coping over time to the broader landscape of stressors that shape racial/ethnic minority adolescents’ health outcomes, and contribute to evidence regarding intervention modalities that can enhance S&P coping. The proposed project combines an interdisciplinary program of research, mentorship, and education/apprenticeships to provide robust training in the following areas: 1) mixture modeling analyses, 2) content expertise in biopsychosocial models of health and use of biomarkers in research, 3) participatory intervention design and evaluation, and 4) professional development. Training in these domains will propel the candidate towards an independent research career focusing on developing evidence-based health interventions for racial/ethnic minority adolescents. Such interventions are crucial to facilitating healthy transitions to adulthood for racial/ethnic minority youth and disrupting pathways to chronic disease, consistent with the priorities of NIMHD.
