Growth Patterns Among Youths' Future Orientation: Protective and Risk Factors for Resilience

Instruction:

Child maltreatment is strongly linked to health risk behaviors. Future orientation (FO), or one’s general expectation about the future, is a multi-dimensional construct that is negatively associated with risk behaviors and has been shown to facilitate positive adjustment despite experiences of chronic stress (e.g., poverty, minority stress).  However, less is known about the development of FO throughout adolescence and, in particular, among youth who are under investigation in child protective services (hereafter refereed as CPS youth) for child abuse. Understanding how promotive factors operate in conjunction with risk is also vital for intervention research. The aim of the present study is to conduct a person-centered evaluation of the development of FO, delineating resultant resilient trajectories and their associations with protective and risk factors from multiple level of youth ecological context among CPS youth.

Methods:

Longitudinal data from 1,461 families (56.30% female; 52.50% white) were obtained from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being.  Data were collected at 4 time points: baseline (M_age =12.22) and 18 (M_age =13.52), 36 (M_age =14.79), and 74 months post-baseline (M_age =18.54).  FO was examined across the first 3 time points.  Risk and protective factors were obtained from different reporters from multiple level in the youth ecology (e.g., supportive mentor, church engagement, family violence, caregiver mental illness, and caseworker-reported severity of maltreatment).  

Results

An exploratory factor analysis followed by confirmatory factor analyses supported a two-factor model of FO (individual & relational).  A parallel-process growth mixture model was used to examine latent trajectories of concurring individual and relational FO.  Results supported four classes: high-stable individual and relational (high-stable pattern; n = 996); high-stable relational and decreasing individual expectations (mixed pattern; n = 230); increasing individual and relational expectations (emergent resilience pattern; n = 176); and decreasing individual and relational expectations (decreasing pattern; n = 42).  The high-stable class was used as the reference group.  A range of risk and protective factors from different levels of the youth ecology were documented to differentially buffer or potentiate the identified FO growth patterns.    

Conclusion

Findings delineate promotive and risk factors related to FO growth heterogeneity and provides new knowledge on the link between future expectations, resilience and psychopathology among CPS youth. The study informs preventive interventions by identifying the development of agentic capacities during adolescence that enable youth to make decisions that are informed by long-term goals (Lerner, 2006).