Timing Matters: A Stage-Sensitive, Culturally Grounded Model of Resilience Mechanisms in Latino Immigrant Adolescents

Abstract

Latino immigrant youth in the U.S. are constantly subject to challenges that affect their well-being (e.g., acculturative stress, discrimination, family separation). Resilience-based interventions have emerged as a response, many are community-centered and rely on external activations of resilience. There is negligible attention to internal resilience activations, and how together with external ones, they interact in culturally situated environments. This thesis extends past research and proposes a theoretical model that specifies which resilience mechanisms are most salient at each stage of adolescence and how sociocultural contexts (e.g., school-based discrimination, familial relationships, peer relationships) enhance or hinder these developmental processes. Adolescence is broken into three stages of development: Early Adolescence (ages 11-13), Middle Adolescence (ages 14-16) and Late Adolescence (ages 17-19). The model identifies a progression from externally scaffolded resilience rooted in relational systems, to cognitively mediated processes involving agency and self-efficacy, to future-oriented and structurally engaged forms of adaptation across the developmental stages respectively. The framework proposes that interventions could be more effective, if they targeted mechanisms appropriate to adolescents’ developmentally-tuned cognitive and emotional capacities (alignment v. misalignment). The thesis introduces a developmental Context–Mechanism– Outcome (CMO) framework, to operationalize how sociocultural contexts activate stage-specific resilience processes and produce varied outcomes. Future action would refine existing resilience-based interventions according to the interchange of developmental timing and the youth’s environmental context. This work offers an integrative account of adaptation among Latino immigrant youth and provides a foundation for designing time-aware and contextually responsive interventions.