Foster Youths' Social Support Across the Transition to Adulthood

Background: Research has shown that social support is critical to successful youth development, particularly during the transition to adulthood. The relationship between social support and young adult outcomes may be especially relevant for youth in foster care, given that experiences of maltreatment and placement in foster care can yield dysfunctional or disrupted social ties to family and community. Careful examination of the ontogeny of social support across the transition to adulthood is an important prerequisite to examining the relationships among social support and foster youths' young-adult outcomes. Such an examination could enrich our understanding of the nature of social support as well as the interrelationships among social support and other developmental processes and milestones, including emancipation from care. Using a sample from several Midwestern states, the current study examines (a) social support development among foster youth during late adolescence and early adulthood and (b) relationship between differences in social support development and constructs previously found to be related social support (e.g., attachment and closeness with biological family).

Methods: Data for this study come from five waves of interviews of foster youth in three Midwestern states that were administered over a period of nine years (age 17 - 26) (N=732). The interview instruments contained measures of a number of domains, including perceived social support (MOS social support questionnaire), attachment-related anxiety and avoidance (Experiences in Close Relationships Scale-Revised), and closeness and frequency of contact with biological family. Using mixture growth models (GMM), we attempt to identify distinct social support trajectories across the transition to adulthood. Using the posterior probabilities generated by the GMM, we then examine the interrelationships among social support trajectories and youths' experiences (e.g., maltreatment) and characteristics (e.g., attachment and closeness with biological family).

Results: Results of the GMM models suggest the existence of several distinct social support trajectories that are distinguished from one another by baseline levels of support as well as the valence, magnitude, and monotonicity of change in social support over the transition to adulthood. The rank order of social support trajectories also appears to change dramatically over time. Further, youth experiencing different trajectories differ from one another in other important ways, including substitute care history, attachment-related avoidance, and closeness with relatives. For example, youth who experience a trajectory characterized by a persistent decline in reported social support are found to report the largest decrease in emotional closeness with their biological mothers.

Implications: These findings illustrate the interdependencies among youths' prior experiences, attachment, family relationships, and social support. Collectively, these constructs describe seemingly disparate sets of experiences and outcomes, reflecting substantial underlying heterogeneity within the population of youth served by child welfare systems. An important implication of this heterogeneity is that the eventual outcomes of foster youth may not be readily discernable at the age of emancipation, underscoring the inherent challenges of effectively targeting and supporting youth emancipating from care.