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Impact of Racial Discrimination and Coping Strategies on Internalizing Symptoms in African American Youth

NCJ Number
226604
Journal
Journal of Youth and Adolescence Volume: 38 Issue: 4 Dated: April 2009 Pages: 532-543
Author(s)
Noni K. Gaylord-Harden; Jamilia A. Cunningham
Date Published
April 2009
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This study examined the impact of racial discrimination stress on internalizing symptoms and coping strategies in African-American early adolescents from low-income communities.
Abstract
Results suggest that the experience of discrimination stress is a risk factor for depression and anxiety in African-American youth. Consistent with predictions, discrimination added unique variance to internalizing symptoms even while controlling for the variance explained by other stressors. Further, the results suggest that African-American youth may prefer to use more culturally-specific coping strategies over mainstream coping strategies. Additionally, discrimination stress significantly predicted greater use of communalistic coping, spiritual coping, and emotional debriefing while controlling for the use of mainstream coping strategies. These findings support existing research with adults and underscore the importance of the role of cultural factors in stress management. Finally, communalistic coping interacted with discrimination stress to predict anxiety. Specifically, at high levels of communalistic coping, increases in discrimination stress were associated with increases in anxiety. Results have implications for the culturally-specific parenting efforts of parents and caregivers of African-American youth. Data were collected from 268 African-American adolescents in sixth through eighth grade from 5 public schools in urban areas. Tables, figure, and references