Elsevier

Children and Youth Services Review

Volume 56, September 2015, Pages 116-125
Children and Youth Services Review

Perceived discrimination, socioeconomic status, and mental health among Latino adolescents in US immigrant families

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.07.011Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Perceived discrimination is positively associated with depressive symptoms.

  • Perceived discrimination is inconsistently associated with self-esteem.

  • SES moderates the association between discrimination and depressive symptoms.

Abstract

The association between interpersonal discrimination and mental health among Latino adolescents has been relatively well studied. Less is known about perceived societal discrimination or how discrimination may differentially impact Latino adolescents with recent immigration histories. Further, while personal and family characteristics have often been posited to influence the association between discrimination and health outcomes, little attention has been paid to potentially moderating influences of social status. Using data from the first two rounds of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) study, we estimate a series of logit regression models to investigate the association between discrimination (societal and interpersonal) and mental health (depressive symptoms and self-esteem) among Latino adolescents with recent immigration histories, and test how this association differs by parental socioeconomic status (SES). Results show a negative association between perceived societal and interpersonal discrimination and mental health, inconsistent associations between SES and mental health, and some evidence of a moderating role of parental SES. Specifically, higher SES appears to attenuate the detrimental effect of discrimination on depressive symptoms, particularly in contexts of interpersonal discrimination. Our findings support increased attention to measuring the impact of perceived societal discrimination on mental health outcomes as well as further examination of the intervening role of social status.

Introduction

Latinos are currently the largest ethnic minority group in the United States, comprising over 16% of the population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014). Children defined as ethnically Latino are the largest and fastest growing segment of the population, currently accounting for approximately a quarter of all children (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, FIFCFS, 2014, Fry and Passel, 2009). Additionally, a majority of the children born to at least one immigrant parent are ethnically Latino (Passel & Cohn, 2011).

Latino immigrant families face a number of stressors associated with the immigration process, including exposure to high rates of discrimination. Though the association between interpersonal discrimination and mental health in Latino adolescents has been relatively well studied (Berkel et al., 2010, Fisher et al., 2000, Greene et al., 2006, Portes and Rumbaut, 2001, Rumbaut, 1994, Smokowski and Bacallao, 2007, Zeiders et al., 2012), much less is known about the effects of perceived group-level discrimination. Further, although personal characteristics such as acculturation and ethnic identity have been hypothesized to explain how Latino mental health can be protected even in situations of high discrimination (Delgado et al., 2009, Phinney et al., 1997, Romero and Roberts, 2003), less attention has been paid to structural indicators, such as social status, and how they may moderate the impact of discrimination.

This study addresses these gaps by examining the role of parental socioeconomic status on the association between various measures of perceived discrimination and two indicators of mental health, depressive symptoms and self-esteem,1 among Latino adolescents with recent immigration histories.

Section snippets

Perceived discrimination and mental health

Latino immigrant families face a number of stressors associated with the processes of immigration and integration into a new host culture. One of the most commonly cited and studied stressors is the experience of discrimination (Alegría and Woo, 2009, Lee and Ahn, 2012), which can be defined as “a behavioral manifestation of a negative attitude, judgment, or unfair treatment toward members of a group” (as cited in Pascoe & Richman, 2009, p. 533). Research has long documented the deleterious

Research question

The purpose of this study is to (1) analyze whether various forms of perceived discrimination affect mental health among Latino adolescents with recent immigration histories, and (2) determine if these effects differ by parental socioeconomic status. As there is little research examining these specific aims, we define the following analyses as exploratory.

Data and sample

This study uses the first two rounds of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) completed in 1992 and 19952 (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). The data collection was timely as a number of political actions related to the United States' immigrant population were

Descriptive analysis

Table 1 presents descriptive associations between perceived discrimination and adolescents' mental health outcomes in the follow-up survey. Results show that adolescents who perceived more societal discrimination (i.e., whose score was above the median) were more likely to report depressive symptoms in the top 50th, 25th, and 10th percentiles of the sample when compared to adolescents who perceived less societal discrimination (i.e., whose score was at or below the median). For instance, 47% of

Discussion

Our study supports previous research in terms of finding a negative association between perceived discrimination and mental health among Latino adolescents (Berkel et al., 2010, Edwards and Romero, 2008, Fisher et al., 2000, Greene et al., 2006, Portes and Rumbaut, 2001, Rumbaut, 1994, Smokowski and Bacallao, 2007, Umaña-Taylor and Updegraff, 2007). Our study also suggests the importance of considering social status variables when examining the impact of discrimination on mental health,

Limitations

Though our study makes an important contribution to the field of literature that examines mental health outcomes among Latino adolescents, we note limitations. First, due to the sampling design of the CILS, our findings are not generalizable to all Latino adolescents with recent immigration histories. The CILS sampled two metropolitan areas of the United States and while these areas are relevant in terms of understanding the experiences of Latino adolescents, they exclude the subset of the

Future research

As our results vary according to the defined cut-off values for both depressive symptoms and self-esteem, future research should consider a range of operationalizations of mental health outcomes. Specifically, our results suggest that ordered generalized linear models with different link functions (e.g., ordered logit) may not be useful for the analysis of the association between perceived discrimination and adolescents' mental health because the parallel lines assumption is violated. The

Conclusion

Though our findings are tempered by notable limitations, they contribute to the discussion about the value of considering the impact of social status variables on the developmental trajectory of ethnic minority adolescents (Alegría and Woo, 2009, García Coll et al., 1996, Gonzales et al., 2009). Our findings support the often-documented negative association between perceived discrimination and mental health but partly contradict the body of evidence that asserts a positive association between

Financial source to be reported

None.

Conflicts of interest

None.

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