This research will examine how distal and proximal societal stressors influence mental health trajectories for a diverse sample of US Latinx youth followed from early childhood into young adulthood. Distal societal stressors, such as the pandemic, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and neighborhood ethnic marginalization, may increase Latinx youth’s internalizing symptoms directly and indirectly through proximal societal stressors, such as families’ COVID-related economic, health, and social problems and individuals’ perceptions of immigrant threats and ethnic discrimination.
This research will leverage advances in Integrated Data Analysis (IDA) to pool data from five longitudinal Latinx cohort studies to obtain a single, aggregated data set with 2,515 Latinx mother-youth dyads following youth from age 2 to 22 (2010-26). This study offers an unparalleled opportunity to understand Latinx mental health in relationship to multi-level stressors, adaptive factors, and sensitive periods of development. As Latinx youth comprise more than one-in-four US youth, findings from this research will help guide new preventive interventions and refine existing ones for a large and growing segment of the US population.