Social Support, Childhood Adversities, and Academic Outcomes: A Latent Class Analysis

Abstract

Childhood adversities tend to impact development in a cumulative way. However, extant research on childhood adversities has focused on a variable-centered approach to examine the cumulative effect of adversity. Using Latent Class Analysis (LCA) and adopting a pattern-centered approach, the authors investigate how different youth may experience different configurations of adversities among a nationally representative sample (N = 14,823, mean age = 21.96, SD = 1.78) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). In addition, they examine how different configurations of adversities are related to different subsequent educational outcomes and how social support from a non-familial adult is associated with these outcomes in different configurations of adversities. They find six unique configurations of childhood adversities. They also find that in addition to the global, cumulative effect of adversity, some configurations of adversity may have a more detrimental risk than others regardless of the sum of experiences. Finally, they reported that having a supportive adult outside of the family is related to better educational outcomes in some configurations of childhood adversities but not the others. Implications for practice and future directions are discussed.