Protective Factors Affecting Low-Income Urban African American Youth Exposed to Stress

Individual (coping strategies), family (parent/child relationships), and community-based (religious involvement) variables were examined as potential protective factors for 224 low-income urban sixth-through eighth-grade African American adolescents. Each of those variables was examined as a moderator, and analyses were conducted to determine whether the association between stress and psychological symptoms was attenuated for youth endorsing positive coping strategies, strong parent/child relationships, and religious involvement. Results indicated that positive relationships with father figures buffered the effects of stress on externalizing symptoms for boys and for girls; religious involvement was protective for girls but not for boys. The sole coping strategy to demonstrate a protective effect was avoidant coping, which attenuated the relation between stress and externalizing symptoms for boys. Supplemental analyses focusing on specific subsets of stressful experiences indicated that avoidant coping and social support-seeking coping accentuated the relation between daily hassles and internalizing symptoms for girls.