Building upon 3 waves of longitudinal data collected during the high school years, this project seeks to reinterview these individuals at two points during the transition to early adulthood to understand the factors influencing continuities and discontinuities in their mental health and social adaptation over a seven year period. Guided by a paradigm of risk and resilience the key explanatory concepts are stress and coping resources, the latter including both individual characteristics and efforts to manage stress, as well as supportive environmental resources. A first Specific Aim is to identify factors that predict to successful functioning in adult roles and continued positive mental health or an attenuation of a previously negative mental health trajectory (i.e. resilience) versus the maintenance or worsening of problems. Analyses address how earlier family stress influences role functioning and mental health in early adulthood, and how prior trajectories of mental health problems influence subsequent adaptation.
A second Aim i s to characterize the social roles and experiences that are associated with poorer mental health in early adulthood. Young adults who experience multiple, more difficult transitions are expected to be more vulnerable to the effects of other stresses and more responsive to social support.
A final Aim i s to understand how the patterns of mental health problems in early adulthood are shaped (comorbidity). Analyses will focus both on specific outcomes (e.g. depressive symptoms, anxiety, alcohol and substance use) and on the patterns of multiple problems, and will also identify risk factors that are common to a range of internalizing and externalizing mental health problems. It is hypothesized that processes of stress accumulation across multiple domains of life functioning will be associated with both a more severe profile on each outcome variable as well as greater risk for multiple mental health problems. Hypotheses are also considered concerning gender differences in exposure and vulnerability to the mental health effects of stress. The study will involve both in-person and telephone interviews with the 939 members of the current sample. Results will contribute to an understanding of risk and resilience as developmentally mediated, to needed research on the difficulties of the early adult years, especially for non-college bound youth, and to theory and research in the behavioral sciences on the issue of cormorbidity and the processes that underlie many mental health problems.
