Adolescents' Exposure to Family and Community Violence

本研究的目的是确定解释为什么一些青少年在应对家庭和社区暴力方面比其他人表现得更差的机制。该研究假设，暴力暴露会侵蚀家庭过程和青少年的日常经历，而这些近距离变量解释了青少年功能受损的原因。该研究通过家庭和同伴互动的行为样本以及14天的日常日记数据，为家庭过程和持续的日常经历提供了深入的视角。该研究还假设，暴力暴露会导致下丘脑-垂体-肾上腺（HPA）轴（通过皮质醇测量）的生物应激失调，并且暴力暴露的青少年在消极的家庭互动中会激活HPA。这项研究扩展了一项正在进行的调查，包括之前对婚姻暴力、亲子攻击和社区暴力的三个评估，这些评估是在一个不同种族的双亲家庭样本中进行的，研究开始时，这些家庭有一个9岁或10岁的孩子。拟议的项目增加了对这些暴露变量的另外三个评估，并将研究从青春期前扩展到青春期后期。六波数据收集允许

The objective of this study is to identify mechanisms that explain why some adolescents fare worse than others in response to family and community violence. The study hypothesizes that violence exposure erodes family processes and adolescents' daily experiences, and that these proximal variables account for compromised adolescent functioning. The study provides in-depth perspectives of family processes and ongoing daily experiences through behavioral samples of family and peer interactions, and through 14 days of daily diary data. The study also hypothesizes that violence exposure leads to dysregulated biological stress of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (measured through cortisol), and that violence-exposed youth are primed for HPA activation in response to negative family interactions. This study extends an ongoing investigation involving three previous assessments of marital violence, parent-child aggression, and community violence in an ethnically diverse sample of two-parent families with a child age 9 or 10 when the study began. The proposed project adds three more assessments of these exposure variables, and extends the study from pre-adolescence through late adolescence. Six waves of data collection allow for the study of cascading effects across time, with feedback loops from negative family processes, adolescent daily experiences and adolescent adjustment contributing in a bi-directional fashion to the likelihood of violence. Repeating, detailed assessments of family and community violence allow for testing whether multiple types of violence, violence at an earlier age, and more persistent violence contribute to more pervasive and deleterious outcomes. Adolescence is targeted because of the importance of understanding how the risks associated with violence exposure coincide with the normal challenges at this time, and because adolescents' abilities to successfully negotiate educational, social, and health domains are highly salient to their subsequent physical and psychological adjustment as young adults. The study has multiple reporters (adolescent, mother, father, peer), uses multiples types of data collection, and measures multiple developmental outcomes (behavioral and psychological functioning; aggression toward others; academic achievement; and high-risk, health-compromising behaviors). Through growth curve models estimated using partial least squares latent variable analysis, we examine multiple pathways through which violence exposure influences adolescent outcomes. The focus on proximal, modifiable variables ultimately can be used to inform intervention and prevention programs for adolescents exposed to violence.