Capital development within supportive adult relationships: processes of positive adaptation for marginalized youth

ABSTRACT

Supportive adults offer adolescents a positive resource for building a resilient profile, as they generally provide guidance, encouragement, and emotional support. These transformative relationships have the potential to unlock specific social and cultural benefits over time that serve to promote resilience, especially in marginalized groups. This mixed-methods study examines supportive adult relationships within the context of sociological concepts of capital development as a process toward positive adaptation. The current study first, uses binary logistic regression as a method of analysis in a racially diverse sample of 4,882 individuals. Findings suggest that individuals who reported having a supportive adult relationship by age 14 were more likely to possess emotional capital than those who did not have a supportive adult relationship by age 14 (OR = .836, p = .009). Secondly this study utilized thematic analysis to identify salient themes regarding social, cultural, and emotional capital from a smaller portion of the sample (N = 111), providing evidence for how SARs can impact the positive adaptation of marginalized individuals through capital development.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk and resilience
• positive adaptation
• supportive adult relationships
• social capital
• cultural capital
• emotional capital
• marginalized youth
• Bourdieu’s sociological model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).