Short-Term and Long-Term Resilience Among At-Risk Adolescents: The Role of Family and Community Settings

ABSTRACT

Objective: Given the severe consequences associated with maltreatment, establishing an understanding of pathways to resilience among trauma-exposed youth is a critical public health aim. Longitudinal research has either examined short-term or long-term responses to traumatic events, which prevents testing for a) individual differences between resilience subtypes and b) consistency of short-term, resilient responses over time. Additionally, post-traumatic stress and depression represent the two most common symptom patterns in youth exposed to maltreatment, however few studies have simultaneously investigated resilience to these outcomes. In response, the current study employs a dimensional analytic approach to distinguish between short-term (the ability to demonstrate adaptive responses to ongoing adversities) and long-term (lack of distress over several years in response to a prior adversity) resilience. Consistent with an ecological perspective, the study examines whether family- and community-level protective factors are similarly or uniquely associated with different resilience subtypes.

Method: Participants included 943 individuals (469 male, 474 female) from a nationally-representative, at-risk sample of adolescents who completed self-report measures of maltreatment exposure, depressive symptoms and post-traumatic stress symptoms at ages 12, 16, and 18. During the age 12 visit, participants’ caregivers completed self-report measures of family routines and neighborhood social cohesion.

Results: Overall, we found that family routines uniquely buffered against trauma-related distress across resilience conceptualizations, while social cohesion played a role in short-term resilience to depressive symptoms (p <.05). Participant gender did not moderate these results (p > .05).

Conclusion: These findings highlight the importance of understanding resilience dimensionally for adolescents exposed to maltreatment.

Acknowledgments

This study includes data from the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN). Initial funding for LONGSCAN was provided by the Office on Child Abuse and Neglect (OCAN), Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services. The data was provided by the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2020.1756296.

Notes

¹ A-priori, the authorship team also planned to include sexual abuse in our composite maltreatment variable. However, given the relatively low endorsement of these experiences in this sample (1–6%), we focused on psychological and physical abuse instead.

² In response to queries regarding non-linear relations, we did not find, overall, that the quadratic function of adversity significantly predicted symptoms across outcomes (p >.05).

³ The use of standardized residual scores minimizes challenges in interpreting different formats of the TSCC across ages.

⁴ In response to queries regarding the moderating effects of study site, we also tested these moderating effects. Across analyses, these findings were non-significant (p >.05). In addition, we entered cumulative between-visit trauma exposure (ages 12–18) as a covariate in our long-term resilience models. Our pattern of findings remained identical when including this variable. Details from these models are available by contacting the first author.