This competitive revision project examined how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the daily lives of Mexican-origin adolescents making the transition to young adulthood. The unique sample of low-income emerging adults from immigrant families were language brokers, translating and interpreting both linguistically and culturally for their English-limited parents.
The COVID-19 pandemic amplified the socio-cultural stressors and health disparities these adolescents faced daily. It was critical to capture how COVID-19-related stressors could potentially alter their health trajectories, as periods of transition (e.g., from high school to young adulthood) and environmental uncertainty (e.g., COVID-19) provided opportunities to examine where individual differences became apparent and how changes in health trajectories took shape.
The three waves of data on adolescents, collected from early to late adolescence before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, were linked to two additional waves of online data collected after the pandemic's onset. The team first examined the impact of COVID-19 stress profiles on health outcomes. Then, they tested how COVID-19-related stress profiles influenced stress responses both behaviorally and physiologically to affect health outcomes. Specifically, they explored whether adaptive responses to COVID-19-related stressors provided avenues of resilience in health outcomes, while maladaptive responses to COVID-19 socio-cultural stressors had the opposite effect. Additionally, they tested whether the associations from socio-cultural stress profiles to stress responses to health outcomes were exacerbated or mitigated through various moderators. Physiological stress responses were assessed via cortisol. A four-day daily diary study was conducted to measure day-to-day cortisol, sleep, and substance use responses to COVID-19-related stressors.
The original sample of Mexican-origin early adolescents was first sampled as middle schoolers (Wave 1) and again one year later (Wave 2). The goal of the first year of the R21 was to re-sample the same set of adolescents after their transition to high school in order to test how early adolescent experiences of socio-cultural stressors influenced stress responses and health outcomes longitudinally. By March 2020, largely before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., the team completed the W3 data collection to reach the stated goals of Year 1 of the R21. In Year 2 of the R21, which began in the summer of 2020, the adolescents in the study were making the transition from high school to young adulthood.
