The relationship between social capital, acculturative stress and depressive symptoms in multicultural adolescents: Verification using multivariate latent growth modeling

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to verify the relationship between social capital, acculturation stress, and depressive symptoms in multicultural adolescents. The data from the Multicultural Adolescents Panel Survey (MAPS) study conducted by the National Youth Policy Institute (NYPI) was used for analysis. Participants were 1635 multicultural adolescents (male 805, female 830; Mean age = 10.98 years [SD = .37]) who were followed over five years. We utilized a Multivariate Latent Growth Modeling to test the relationship between the variables and a Bias-corrected bootstrap test was conducted to verify the indirect effects. Findings showed that increases in social capital were related to decreases in depressive symptoms in multicultural adolescents and increases in social capital were associated with decreases in acculturative stress. In addition, increases in acculturative stress were related to increases in depressive symptoms. Finally, social capital indirectly affected depressive symptoms by mediating acculturative stress. The present results suggest that policies for increasing the social capital of multicultural adolescents at the national and community levels are needed to alleviate acculturative stress in multicultural adolescents, which can help decrease their depressive symptoms.