About this poster

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Panel information
Panel 7. Health and Wellbeing

Abstract

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Many adolescents in the United States (US) experience interpersonal violence. Such experiences increase the risk for adolescent mental health symptoms (trauma, internalizing, and externalizing) and delinquency (Gershoff, 2013; Piolanti et al., 2023; Vu et al., 2016). Experiencing more than one form of interpersonal violence increases this risk even further (e.g., Cheung & Huang, 2023; Gómez, 2011; Jouriles et al., 2012). Many adolescents of color in the US also experience interpersonal discrimination because of their ethnoracial background (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2018), and racial discrimination is also associated with a range of adolescent mental health symptoms (Benner et al., 2018; Priest et al., 2013). Although racial discrimination has been conceptualized as a form of interpersonal violence (e.g., Bryant-Davis & Ocampo, 2005; Carter, 2007; Sanders-Phillips, 2009), it is rarely included together with other forms of interpersonal violence in studies to delineate how interpersonal violence contributes to youth mental health symptoms. The current study examined how interpersonal racial discrimination experiences, together with other forms of interpersonal violence, contribute to mental health symptoms among justice-involved adolescents of color.

Participants were 118 adolescents of color and their mothers. Adolescents were in the juvenile justice system and ranged in age from 14 to 17 (M = 15.77, SD = 1.08; 52.5% male; 77.1% Black/African American). At baseline, adolescents reported on experiences of interpersonal racial discrimination, harsh parenting, teen dating violence, and exposure to interparental physical intimate partner violence. At baseline and the 3-month follow-up assessment, adolescents reported on trauma symptoms, and adolescents and their mothers reported on the adolescents’ externalizing and internalizing symptoms.

Approximately half of the adolescents reported at least one interpersonal racial discrimination experience in the past 3 months (49.2%; n = 58). Multivariate multilevel modeling results indicated that interpersonal racial discrimination experiences contributed additively to mental health symptoms at both the baseline and 3-month follow-up assessments, after accounting for exposure to other forms of interpersonal violence. We also explored whether the relation of interpersonal racial discrimination experiences to adolescent mental health symptoms was greater among adolescents who experienced other forms of interpersonal violence by adding the interaction of each of the forms of violence experiences with racial discrimination experiences to the model. Neither dating violence nor parental physical intimate partner violence moderated the associations between racial discrimination experiences and any of the mental health outcomes at baseline. However, parent-child violence moderated the association of interpersonal racial discrimination experiences with mental health symptoms, both at baseline and the 3-month follow-up, with greater parent-child violence associated with a weaker relation between discrimination experiences and mental health symptoms.

These findings highlight the importance of considering adolescents’ experiences of interpersonal racial discrimination together with other interpersonal violence experiences in research focused on understanding the mental health symptoms of justice-involved adolescents of color. Specifically, researchers should include measures of interpersonal racial discrimination when testing hypotheses about youth exposure to different types of interpersonal violence. The findings also highlight the potential contributions of interpersonal racial discrimination to the mental health symptoms of adolescents in the juvenile justice system. These youth may benefit from interventions that increase skills and strategies for mitigating the adverse effects of violence and discrimination experiences.

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