The influence of socioeconomic status and ethnicity on adolescents' exposure to stressful life events

Abstract

Objective: To test the relations between resource-based and prestige-based measures of socioeconomic status (SES), ethnicity, and life events that varied in valence, dependency on adolescent behavior, and duration. Method: Six measures of SES were administered to the parents of 148 black and white adolescents, who completed a measure of five mutually exclusive categories of life events. Results: As predicted, our results suggest that having few assets and being black were independently related to life events exposure. Correlations between socioeconomic indices were not so high as to suggest redundancy, and different SES indicators were of importance in predicting exposure to different types of life events.