Social connections, trajectories of hopelessness, and serious violence in impoverished urban youth
Open accessAbstract
Youth living in impoverished urban neighborhoods are at risk for becoming hopeless about their future and engaging in violent behaviors. The current study seeks to examine the longitudinal relationship between social connections, hopelessness trajectories, and subsequent violent behavior across adolescence. Our sample included 723 (49% female) African American youth living in impoverished urban neighborhoods who participated in the Mobile Youth Survey from 1998 through 2006. Using general growth mixture modeling, we found two hopelessness trajectory classes for both boys and girls during middle adolescence: a consistently low hopelessness class and an increasingly hopeless class with quadratic change. In all classes, youth who reported stronger early adolescent connections to their mothers were less hopeless at age 13. The probability of later adolescent violence with a weapon was higher for boys and was associated with the increasingly hopeless class for both boys and girls. Implications for new avenues of research and design of hope-based prevention interventions will be discussed.
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A greater constellation of factors are implicated in youth despair beyond agency or mastery, including attachment disruptions, hormonal-related coping/emotional dysregulation challenges, and emerging spiritual individuation.
“Taken together, these modest findings are not surprising, given that a greater constellation of factors are implicated in youth despair beyond agency or mastery, including attachment disruptions (Stoddard et al., 2011), hormonal-related coping/emotional dysregulation challenges (Ho et al., 2022), and emerging spiritual individuation (Miller and Barton, 2015).”
From A hope intervention for adolescents: a randomized controlled trial delivered by paraprofessionals (2025) · cites this paper as Stoddard et al., 2011
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A hope intervention for adolescents: a randomized controlled trial delivered by paraprofessionals
Scioli, A., MacPherson, N., Murphy, R., Gooding, T., Love, M., Lyons, K. D., & Adachi-Mejia, A. M. (2025) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1528504 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
- Authors
- Stoddard, S. A., Henly, S. J., Sieving, R. E., & Bolland, J.
- Affiliations
- University of Michigan (US)
- University of Minnesota (US)
- University of Alabama (US)
- Corresponding author
- Stoddard, Sarah A.
- Venue
- Journal of Youth and Adolescence
- Published
- 2010-08-06
- Volume
- 40
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 278-295
- ISSN
- 0047-2891 (ISSN-L)
- 1573-6601
- PMC
- PMC3105375
- OpenAlex
- W2083204634
- Cited by
- 125
- References
- 88
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 14 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 22.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Journal of Youth and Adolescence (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy (University of Minnesota) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (5t32nr007073-19)
- National Institute of Nursing Research (T32-NR-007073)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Crime Patterns and Interventions
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Optimism, Hope, and Well-being
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
- Keywords
- hopelessness, social connectedness, youth violence, urban poverty, African American youth, mother-adolescent relationship, adolescence
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adolescent Behavior, Age Factors, Alabama, Black or African American, Child, Depression, Female, Humans, Longitudinal Studies, Male, Models, Psychological, Mother-Child Relations, Negativism, Poverty, Public Housing, Risk Factors, Sex Factors, Socioeconomic Factors, Urban Population, Violence, Adolescent Development, Self Report
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