Objectives:We examined the prospective association (from M age ϭ 15.84 to 17.38 years) between bicultural competence and mental health among U.S. Mexican-origin adolescents relative to multiple (a) developmental niches, (b) components of bicultural competence, and (c) indicators of mental health. Method: Participants included 749 adolescents (49% female, 29.7% Mexico-born) recruited during late childhood and followed through late adolescence. We used latent profile analyses to identify adolescents' developmental niches based on sociocultural characteristics of the family, school, and neighborhood contexts and multiple-group structural equation modeling to examine whether these niches moderated the association between bicultural competence and mental health. Results: We identified 5 distinct adolescents' developmental niches. We found no association between bicultural competence and internalizing symptoms across niches; bicultural facility predicted lower externalizing symptoms among adolescents developing in niches characterized by immigrant families and predominantly Latino schools and neighborhoods. Conclusions: The diversity found among U.S. Mexican-origin adolescents' niches underscores the need to assess context broadly by including a range of settings. Studying multiple components of bicultural competence across numerous cultural domains may provide a better understanding of any mental health benefits of biculturalism.

Family stress model research suggests that parents' exposure to environmental stressors can disrupt key parenting processes. As family stress model scholarship has expanded to include increasingly diverse populations and a wider range of contexts, studies have documented important nuances. One of these nuances concerns U.S. Mexican parents' use of harsh parenting. In the current study, we examined the harshness-as-disruption family stress-model hypothesis, which specifies parental emotional distress as a mediator of positive associations between neighborhood danger and parental harshness. We contrasted this perspective with cultural-developmental perspectives suggesting that harsh parenting may be an important parenting adaptation to dangerous neighborhood environments (harshness-as-adaptation). We tested the harshness-as-disruption hypothesis prospectively, in a sample of U.S. Mexican mothers ( = 749) and fathers ( = 579) with children in the late childhood to early adolescent age-range. Both mothers and fathers demonstrated higher levels of depression symptoms in the face of neighborhood danger. Fathers' harsh parenting, however, was unrelated to neighborhood danger or depressive symptoms. All mothers demonstrated some evidence of the harshness-as-disruption family stress process. For highly familistic mothers, however, harsh parenting may reflect a combination of harshness-as-disruption and harshness-as-adaptation processes. This combined interpretation is consistent with cultural-developmental models highlighting structural inequalities that filter families of color into lower-resourced, more stressful environments, but simultaneously recognizing that families' and communities' adapting cultural systems support parenting responses to such circumstances. (PsycINFO Database Record

Over the last decade, two lines of inquiry have emerged from earlier investigations of adolescent neighborhood effects. First, researchers began incorporating space‐time geography to study adolescent development within activity spaces or routine activity locations and settings. Second, cultural‐developmental researchers implicated neighborhood settings in cultural development, to capture neighborhood effects on competencies and processes that are salient or normative for minoritized youth. We review the decade’s studies on adolescent externalizing, internalizing, academic achievement, health, and cultural development within neighborhoods and activity spaces. We offer recommendations supporting decompartmentalization of cultural‐developmental and activity space scholarship to advance the science of adolescent development in context.

Introduction: Evidence suggesting a link between neighborhood ethnic-racial concentrations and adolescent behaviour problems in the U.S. is mixed, with some studies documenting negative and others positive associations. This work raises important questions about promoting and inhibiting efects of neighborhood environments characterized by high concentrations of ethnic-racial minority groups, including Asian Americans, Blacks or African Americans, and Latinos. We conducted a meta-analysis to examine 1) the magnitude, direction, and variability of the association between neighborhood ethnic-racial concentrations and adolescent behaviour problems, and 2) whether these associations varied by putative moderators. Methods: We conducted a systematic search in PsycINFO, Web of Science, and PubMed as well as searching reference lists and relying on expert knowledge (285 initial records). We coded the records for theoretical and design elements. Results: We included 40 efect sizes from 17 records (24% unpublished) with N = 11,858. The average association between neighborhood ethnic-racial concentrations and adolescent behaviour problems was not signiicantly diferent from zero (r = −0.001, 95% CI -0.048, 0.046, p = .964, τ 2 = 0.006); there was a large percentage of systematic heterogeneity (I 2 = 77.1%), which was not explained by putative moderators. Conclusions: There is substantial unexplained systematic heterogeneity in the association between neighborhood ethnic-racial concentrations and adolescents' behaviour problems. There is heavy reliance on a small number of parent datasets in research on this topic, alongside critical reporting omissions. We ofer recommendations to guide future work, in hopes of supporting culturally and developmentally informed policies and programs capable of addressing residential segregation.

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