The Material Context of Adolescent Identity Formation: A Family Economic Stress Approach

ABSTRACT

Grounded in the family stress model and recent studies on cognitive effects of poverty, the current study examines how family material conditions relate to identity-relevant information processing among adolescents via family economic strain, family financial conflicts, and parenting behaviors. Data for the study come from the first wave of a longitudinal study on the development of adolescent goals in the context of socio-economic inequalities. The sample includes 1,268 adolescents (51.7% females; M = 14.87; SD = 0.39) attending 36 gymnasiums. Findings reveal that the family economic situation contributes to how adolescents process identity-relevant information, but these effects are primarily indirect. Specifically, better family material conditions are associated with more supportive parental engagement in their children’s identity-relevant decisions, which in turn is associated with higher levels of the information-oriented identity processing style. Poorer family material conditions, economic pressures, and conflicts are associated with parental interference and a lack of engagement, which in turn is associated with higher levels of diffuse-avoidant identity style. The identity styles themselves are known predictors for a wide array of outcomes. Therefore, our findings suggest that countering the adverse effects of socio-economic inequality may be crucial to break a self-perpetuation cycle of socio-economic adversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Family stress
• identity styles
• adolescents
• socio-economic status

Acknowledgments

We thank our colleagues Dr. Saulė Raižienė, Dr. Berita Simonaitienė, and Dr. Aldona Augustinienė for their contribution to the data collection and design of the study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Authors’ contributions

Rimantas Vosylis and Rasa Erentaitė contributed to conception, design, acquisition, analysis, and drafted the manuscript. Theo Klimstra contributed to conception, analysis, and drafted the manuscript. All three authors contributed to interpretation, critically revised the manuscript, gave final approval, and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of work ensuring integrity and accuracy.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Ethical aspects of the study were reviewed and approved by the Civil Society and Sustainability research group at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology (protocol no. V19-1253-12, issued on October 11, 2019).

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual study participants and their parents.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Lithuania (grant agreement no. S-MIP-19-26).