Abstract
African American youth who experience racial discrimination are at heightened risk to use drugs as a coping response to distress. Based on the buffer-stress hypothesis, we proposed that parental support would attenuate this effect. Participants were 1,521 African American youth between 4th and 12th grade. As hypothesized, a mediation pathway was observed among racial discrimination, depression symptoms, and drug use. This effect was observed for both genders, although the pathway was partially mediated for males. In addition, as hypothesized, parental support buffered the negative effect of depression symptomatology on drug use as a consequence of discrimination. Our findings highlight the impact racial discrimination has on health outcomes for African American youth and the importance of managing youths’ emotional responses to discrimination. Moreover, findings illuminate the protective role of supportive parenting within the risk model and should thus be considered as an important component within prevention programming for this population of youth.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-1-2016
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702616646371
Funding Information
This research was supported by NIH award KL2TR001106 to A. Shekhar and Tamika Zapolski and by NIH award DA05312 to Sycarah Fisher.
Repository Citation
Zapolski, Tamika C. B.; Fisher, Sycarah; Hsu, Wei-Wen; and Barnes, Jessica, "What Can Parents Do? Examining the Role of Parental Support on the Negative Relationship between Racial Discrimination, Depression, and Drug Use among African American Youth" (2016). Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology Faculty Publications. 37.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/edp_facpub/37
Included in
Counseling Psychology Commons, Educational Psychology Commons, Student Counseling and Personnel Services Commons
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Clinical Psychological Science, v. 4, issue 4, p. 718-731.
The copyright holder has granted the permission for posting the article here.
The document available for download is the authors' post-peer-review final draft of the article.