Societal stressors, adaptive factors, and developmental timing: Influences on Latinx mental health from early childhood through young adulthood - Abstract In 2021, the US Surgeon General issued an advisory warning of a youth mental health crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Latinx youth, a group marginalized by race, ethnicity, class, and culture, have exceedingly high rates of internalizing symptoms such as depression and anxiety. Ecosocial theory posits that historical, societal, and ecological conditions over the life course have critical impacts on later mental health. This research will examine how distal and proximal societal stressors influence mental health trajectories for a diverse sample of US Latinx youth followed from early childhood into young adulthood. Distal societal stressors, such as the pandemic, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and neighborhood ethnic marginalization, may increase Latinx youth’s internalizing symptoms directly and indirectly through proximal societal stressors, such as families’ COVID-related economic, health, and social problems and individuals’ perceptions of immigrant threats and ethnic discrimination. These kinds of societal stressors also may have direct and indirect effects on increased internalizing symptoms through family stress processes, including maternal depression and harsh parenting. The nature of youth’s exposure to these stressors (for how long, when in history and development) and the presence of protective adaptive factors (e.g., parents’ cultural socialization; youth self-regulation) can moderate stressor impacts on internalizing symptoms. This research will leverage advances in Integrated Data Analysis (IDA) to pool data from five longitudinal Latinx cohort studies to obtain a single, aggregated data set with 2,515 Latinx mother-youth dyads following youth from age 2 to 22 (2010-26). IDA increases statistical power, sample heterogeneity and generalizability, and measurement breadth and depth in ways not possible with a single data set. The application will support 1) collecting cross-sectional data for 500 Latinx individuals to establish standard measurement scaling across the five studies; 2) integrating data across all five studies; and 3) extracting data from Twitter and the US Census to assess anti-immigrant rhetoric and neighborhood factors, respectively. Analyses will utilize a general latent variable modeling framework that includes multilevel modeling, structural equation modeling, item response modeling, and finite mixture modeling. We hypothesize a cascade of effects from distal societal stressors to increased internalizing symptoms through greater proximal societal stressors and increased family stress processes. We expect that pathways linking societal stressors to youth’s internalizing symptoms will vary depending upon the presence of adaptive factors, the developmental timing and cumulative effects of youth experiences, and sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., youth biological sex, family national origin). This study offers an unparalleled opportunity to understand Latinx mental health in relationship to multi-level stressors, adaptive factors, and sensitive periods of development. As Latinx youth comprise more than one-in-four US youth, findings from this research will help guide new preventive interventions and refine existing ones for a large and growing segment of the US population.
