Children's stress and social support as predictors of adjustment

This study examined associations between types of stress (chronic stressful circumstances, negative major life events, and uncontrollable daily hassles) and social support (from family, peers, and teachers), and the predictive utility of these variables for changes in children's adjustment (self-rated depression, parent-rated behavioral adjustment, teacher-rated socioemotional adjustment) across 1 year, with a sample of lower-income urban fifth graders. The three types of stress were found to be moderately intercorrelated, as was social support from each of the three sources. None of the stressors were associated with teacher support, but negative life events and uncontrollable daily hassles were significantly correlated with both family and peer support. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to determine the extent to which each of the stress and support variables and their interactions contributed to the variance in adjustment scores. Gender and adjustment from 1 year prior were entered as control variables. Among the stress variables, chronic stress negatively predicted changes in parent ratings of behavioral adjustment, and negative life events and daily hassles positively predicted changes in self-rated depression. Family, peer, and teacher support negatively predicted self-rated depression, and teacher support approached significance as a predictor of teacher ratings of socioemotional adjustment. Several interaction terms were significant: Family support interacted with chronic stress and daily hassles in the prediction of self-rated depression, and peer support interacted with negative life events in the prediction of parent-rated behavioral adjustment. Overall, the results showed that stress and social support are better predictors of depression than they are of behavioral and socioemotional adjustment. Separate sets of analyses were conducted to examine whether stress and social support evidence different patterns of predictive utility for adjustment outcomes between Black and White children, and between children who lived in poor families and those who did not. Several differences were found between these groups of children in terms of the particular variables which predicted each adjustment index. However, the race differences were largely explainable in terms of poverty status.