The Relations Between Neighborhood and Family Factors in the Healthy Development of African American Youth

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ABSTRACT Understanding the adoption of early healthy coping patterns in children and young adolescents who live in violent contexts can reveal strengths that are vital in both families and individuals who reside in neighborhoods characterized by high crime, poverty, racial segregation and family stress. Research has shown that youth who consistently experience and witness community violence in their neighborhoods are at increased risk for psychological issues such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Scholars have indicated that for African American populations, subjective measures such as reports of neighborhood stress are associated with more psychological distress, while youth perceptions of neighborhood cohesion are related to lower levels of psychological stress. Coming home to a family who is aware of and discussing explicitly coping measures to be taken in such contexts allows youth to develop resilience that gives them the tools necessary to look beyond their environment to a different future. One such tool is racial-ethnic socialization (RES), defined as the transmission of attitudes, beliefs and values surrounding race/ethnicity. The focus of this proposed project is to understand how neighborhood factors are related to race-related socialization and healthy development of African American children. The proposed project will collect data from a sample of 100 African American children ages 8-15 and their parents within the first two years of the study to explore how subjective and objective characteristics of neighborhoods is associated with mental health outcomes. Additionally, we seek to understand if RES moderates the effects of neighborhood factors on mental health outcomes. We will be using the collected data to examine each of our aims. Aim 1 identifies objective and subjective neighborhood profiles that serve as a basis for understanding how these profiles link to mental health outcomes for youth (Aim 2). Finally, Aim 3 examines how neighborhood profiles and mental health outcomes can be mitigated by ERS, providing evidence-based data for future interventions in racial-ethnic socialization.