Racial Discrimination and Mental Health: The Direct and Moderating Effects of Social Support By Sources on Asian American Youth

Purpose: Asian American (AA) youth experience detrimental effects of racial discrimination as much as any other racially minoritized group in the U.S. Extant research has identified the distress-alleviating role of social support associated with racially minoritized status. Previous efforts are limited, however, by predominantly focusing on cross-sectional data and their tendency to ignore different sources of support and the differential implications across social groups. This four-wave longitudinal study examines whether and how the burden of racial discrimination is moderated by social support from different sources (i.e., family, school, community, and religious organization) with mental health outcomes (i.e., depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts). We further examine how these moderating effects vary by nativity (U.S.-born vs. foreign-born) and biological sex (i.e., female vs. male) across Filipino American (FA) and Korean American (KA) youth.

Methods: Data are from the Midwest Longitudinal Study of Asian American Families (MLSAAF) project, a longitudinal survey of FA and KA youth and their parents living in a Midwest metropolitan area. This study used four waves of youth data. The first wave was collected in 2014 from 378 FA youth and 408 KA youth (N=786). Stepwise mixed effects regression models first examined (1) the impact of racial discrimination, each source of support on mental health outcomes, (2) two-way interaction effects (discrimination × each source of support) and (3) three-way interaction effects (discrimination × each source of support × nativity or biological sex).

Results: Social support, regardless of its sources, was predictive of better mental health outcomes. We also found differential distress-moderating effects of social support by its sources across ethnicity. That is, school and community support buffered the negative effect of racial discrimination on depressive symptoms among KA youth, while it was religious support for FA youth. These differential impacts further varied by nativity but not by biological sex, particularly among FA youth. That is, the mitigating effect of community support on depressive symptoms was significant only among U.S.-born FA youth (vs. Foreign-born FA).

Conclusions and Implications: The findings have scholarly and practical implications related to healthy AA youth development. First, the findings underscore the multi-dimensional nature of social support and its influence by ethnicity. That is, religious support that has been salient among FA group seems to be beneficial in dealing with the burden of racial discrimination, while for KA group, one of the most separated AA subgroups, social support from the society (e.g., community and school) were particularly protective against the negative experience of racial discrimination. The study further demonstrates that among FA youth, U.S.-born only benefited from community support in reducing the psychological tolls of racial discrimination. This finding is significant because U.S.-born and FA youth in particular have reported more mental health struggles than their foreign-born counterparts and other AA subgroups. This study highlights the significance of group specific social support interventions to be meaningfully effective in helping AA youth to respond to racial discrimination.