The significance of feeling needed and useful to family and friends for psychological well-being during adolescence.

INTRODUCTION: Social relationships offer the opportunity to provide support and resources to others. Feeling needed and useful to others has been understudied during adolescence, despite being shown to predict health and well-being during adulthood. The current study examined this underappreciated way in which family and peer relationships may shape psychological well-being during adolescence. METHOD: A cross-sectional sample of high school students across the United States completed an on-line questionnaire during school hours in the fall of 2020. The sample consisted of 1301 adolescents averaging 15.94 (SD = 1.24) years in age in the ninth through twelfth grades, with 48.4% identifying as female, 47.3% as male, and 3.2% reporting either other gender identities or preferring not to answer (1%). Participants identified as Hispanic or Latino (40.2%), European American (19.8%), African American (14.7%), Multiethnic (9.2%), Asian American (7%), Other Ethnicities (7.8%), and 1.3% did not report their ethnicity. RESULTS: Feeling needed and useful was predicted by both helping and receiving support from others, strongly predicted better psychological well-being, and mediated associations of helping and receiving support with well-being. Males reported feeling more needed by their family as compared to females, and both reported higher levels of being useful to their family than those with other gender identifications. CONCLUSIONS: Like adults, adolescents have a need to contribute and feel needed in their social worlds. Studies of close relationships should incorporate the ways in which youth provide resources and support to others in their lives as well as the sense of feeling needed and useful derived from those activities.

Youth's Experiences of the Devaluing of Their Contributions Due to Their Ethnicity and Gender.

The message that one's contributions are devalued can be a significant way that youth experience marginalization during the transition into adulthood. Participants (N = 298, Mage = 19.47 years, 51% female) reported having their ideas, opinions, and contributions being unwelcomed due to their ethnicity and gender. African American, Latinx, and Asian American young women indicated the most frequent devalued contributions. Devalued contributions due to ethnicity and gender were most strongly linked among these groups and Multiethnic youth than European American youth. Devalued contributions predicted depressive symptoms, feeling more needed and useful by society, and a greater sense of purpose beyond a traditional measure of discrimination. Assessing experiences of devalued contributions can provide a more thorough understanding of how marginalization shapes the transition to adulthood.

Feeling Needed and Useful during the Transition to Young Adulthood.

A more complete understanding of the role of social relationships during the transition to young adulthood should include the extent to which adolescents believe that others see them as needed and useful. Two samples of late adolescents (Ns = 237, 298) aged 18 to 25 years completed measures of feeling needed and useful by family and friends. Feeling needed and useful by family and friends did not differ across demographic groups, was associated with greater received support, and predicted psychological well-being above-and-beyond received support. Future research should examine how social relationships provide late adolescents with the opportunity to be needed and useful at a time of life when they are seeking to establish their place in the social world.

Predictors of Caregiver Participation in an Engagement Strategy to Increase Initiation into a Family-Based Preventive Intervention.

Previous studies have shown that engagement strategies can help increase enrollment and initiation of families in evidence-based preventive programs under natural service delivery settings. However, little is known about factors that predict completion of these engagement strategies. This study aimed to examine predictors (i.e., perceived need, perceived barriers, and sociocultural context) of caregiver participation in an evidence-based engagement call strategy. This call was expected to increase initiation into a school-based, family-focused prevention program. In addition, this study examined engagement call completion as a predictor of program initiation among already enrolled families. Participants included ethnically diverse families recruited from three Title I schools (n = 413) who were randomized to receive the prevention program. Results showed that interparental conflict-an indicator of perceived need-was associated with an increased likelihood of completing the engagement call. Furthermore, caregivers from low-socioeconomic status (SES), foreign-born, Spanish-speaking, Hispanic families were more likely to complete the call relative to those from low- and mid-SES, US born, English-speaking, ethnically diverse families. Importantly, engagement call completion was associated with an increased likelihood of program initiation. These findings provide limited support that families with higher perceived needs are more likely to participate in an evidence-based engagement call strategy. Results suggested that the call strategy provides a promising way to reduce attrition from family prevention programs, which is commonly observed between enrollment and initiation. Project Number: R01 DA035855; Date of Registration: 06/15/2014.