Socio-Cultural Stress Profiles, Stress Responses, and Health in Mexican American Adolescents

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This competitive revision application examines ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic disrupts the daily lives of Mexican-origin adolescents who are making the transition to young adulthood. This unique sample of low- income emerging adults from immigrant families are language brokers, who translate and interpret both linguistically and culturally for their English-limited parents. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the socio- cultural stressors and health disparities they face on a daily basis. It is critical to capture how COVID-19 related stressors may potentially alter their health trajectories, as periods of transition (e.g., from high school to young adulthood) and environmental uncertainty (e.g., COVID-19) provide opportunities to examine where in the life course individual differences become apparent and how changes in health trajectories take shape. The three waves of data on adolescents collected from early to late adolescence before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic will be linked to two additional waves of online data collected after the onset of COVID-19. We first examine the impact of COVID-19 stress profiles on health outcomes. We then test how COVID-19 related stress profiles influence stress responses both behaviorally and physiologically to influence health outcomes. Specifically, whether adaptive responses to COVID-19 related stressors provide avenues of resilience in health outcomes, whereas the opposite may be the case for those who experience COVID-19 socio-cultural stressors in maladaptive ways. Further, we propose to test whether the associations from socio-cultural stress profiles to stress responses to health outcomes are exacerbated or mitigated through various moderators. Physiological stress responses will be assessed via cortisol. Through a four-day daily diary study, day-to-day cortisol, sleep, and substance use responses to COVID-19 related stressors will be measured. The original sample of Mexican-origin early adolescents were sampled first as middle schoolers (Wave 1) and again one year later (Wave 2). The goal of the first year of the R21 was to re-sample the same set of adolescents after their transition to high school, in order to test how early adolescent experiences of socio-cultural stressors longitudinally influence stress responses and health outcomes. By March 2020, largely before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., we completed the proposed W3 data collection to reach the stated goals of Year 1 of the R21. In Year 2 of the R21, which starts in the summer of 2020, the adolescents in the study will be making the transition from high school to young adulthood. The supplement will coincide with Year 2 of the R21 grant, a critical juncture for capturing the health trajectories of emerging adults, and an opportune time to lay the foundation for determining the COVID-19 pandemic’s long-term influence on their adult health. This project has the potential to uncover processes and practices that can reduce persistent health disparities in Mexican immigrant families that may result from COVID-19.