Session: The Transition to Young Adulthood Among Youth from Small and Rural Towns (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

This symposium highlights issues related to the transition to young adulthood for youth from small and rural towns. Prior research has shown that youth from small towns often move away following high school, typically to pursue education and other opportunities that may not exist in their home towns. Those who remain may be at higher risk for problem behaviors and transitioning early to adult roles and responsibilities, largely related to limited educational and economic opportunities. This symposium uses data from a longitudinal panel followed over 11 years (from grade 5 to age 21), to examine outcomes at Age 21, including comparisons of those who moved away and those who stayed in their rural home towns. By this age, approximately half of young adults in the sample had moved away from the towns in which they lived at the start of the study.

The panel of 4407 participants was established as part of a community-randomized trial of Communities That Care (CTC) in 24 small towns in 7 states. CTC is a science-based community prevention capacity building and planning system designed to prevent behavioral health problems among youth community-wide. CTC guides communities to install, implement, and monitor the results of tested and effective prevention programs and policies that address community-specific elevated risk factors and depressed protective factors and reduce problem behavior. The trial has shown that CTC can produce sustained reductions in youth delinquency, violence, and substance use through the end of high school, with sustained effects on delinquency and substance use in males through Age 19.

The first paper presents a latent class analysis of different role combinations (e.g., education, work, romantic relationships) in young adulthood and examines whether young adult stayers move more quickly into young adult roles than movers. The second paper evaluates whether CTC, which was designed to strengthen communities, was related to more favorable outcomes among stayers in CTC communities compared to stayers in control communities who were not exposed to CTC. It also compares Age 21 substance use and mental health outcomes among movers and stayers. The third paper presents a qualitative analysis of young adults’ own words and self-reflections about salient life events that may act as turning points in their lives. Implications for prevention and young adult development will be discussed.