The Persistent Effects of the Adolescent Context on Outcomes into Adulthood: A Longitudinal, Person-Oriented Analysis

Background/purpose: Adolescence is a crucial time in the developmental trajectory as youth begin to explore their environments independently. The evidence suggests that patterns of behavior that emerge during this phase can either ease the successful transition to adulthood or hasten negative outcomes that include criminality, low educational attainment, and poverty (O’Connell et al., 2009). Recent scholarship has also established that a complex social ecology is responsible for these outcomes (Masters & Cicchetti, 2010). While recent investigations have indeed begun to examine the effects of these multiple domains of human ecology, examination of the long-term influence of these multiple contexts has been limited. This study takes a holistic, interactive approach to understanding youth social milieu by using person centered analytic methods (Lanza & Cooper, 2016) to study the contribution of the family, poverty, and neighborhood contexts on criminality, victimization, income, and educational attainment from adolescence to adulthood.

Methods: Data are drawn from a longitudinal survey (n=625) of young men from a midsize, northeastern U. S. city. The first three waves spanned late adolescence with a fourth wave collected ten years later at average age of 30. Previous latent class analysis established four classes based on the ecological context relative to family, neighborhood, and poverty indicators. The present analysis examined the long-term outcomes of those classes into adulthood.

Results:

Group differences reflected heterogeneity with respect to family and neighborhood resources, quality of parenting, and poverty. The Resourced & Protected class (19.7%) fared the best of any class, with low criminality and victimization rates into adulthood, and the highest levels of income and educational attainment. Non-Resourced but Protected (23.2%) youth came from poorer but high-functioning families. Although their violent criminality and victimization rates were relatively low compared to other groups, their educational and income attainment was low in early adulthood. Resourced but High Risk (19.8%) achieved the second-highest rates of education and income, though they remained engaged in criminality, substance use, and victimization through adolescence. Non-resourced and High Risk (37.3%) youth had the worst outcome of any class, especially in regard to education and criminality; while most groups demonstrated natural desistance from crime into adulthood, their rates remained elevated at age 30.

Conclusions/implications: These results provide empirical evidence that the influence of family, poverty, and toxic neighborhood contexts persist into adulthood. Congruent with other research (Evans & Kim, 2013; Marotta & Voisin, 2017), poverty and neighborhood contexts appear to have strong influence on income and educational attainment, despite diminishing behavioral differences that reflect natural desistance. Findings suggests that interventions are urgently needed to make the social ecology of youth as amenable as possible to healthy development. Given this year’s theme of “Achieving Equal Opportunity for All,” these results speak strongly to the need to address persistent, intergenerational effects of poverty and poor neighborhoods on vulnerable youth.