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Assessing Future Expectations of Low-Income Minority Young Men: Survival-Threats and Positive Expectations

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Abstract

Future expectations, a subset of overall orientation, represent youths’ most realistic appraisals of future outcomes, and has been demonstrated to be associated with a range of health risk behaviors and wellbeing. The current study extends previous measurement efforts to operationalize and measure future expectations by estimating a multidimensional model of future expectations encompassing both positive and survival-based expectations, and using longitudinal data to test the consistency of these constructs over time. The current work uses data from six waves of the Chicago Youth Development Study (n = 338), a sample of African American and Latino young men from low income neighborhoods in an urban center, to test a hypothesized multidimensional structure of future expectations across adolescence. Test retest confirmatory factor analyses from six waves of data covering the mean age range of 12–19 years reveal good model fit for the hypothesized multidimensional model of future expectations at each wave. Strong measurement invariance based on race/ethnicity is established for the multidimensional model. Implications for a latent construct approach to future expectations with low-income racial/ethnic minority young men are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

This publication was made possible with Grant support from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (TL1 RR 025016), and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded Postdoctoral Training Program (T32 DA019426). The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the original study team and leads, Drs. Deborah Gorman-Smith, David B. Henry, and Patrick Tolan for support in developing this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yale School of Medicine, 389 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT, 06515, USA

    Dana M. Prince

  2. Social Development Research Group, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Marina Epstein

  3. University of Washington School of Social Work, Seattle, WA, USA

    Paula S. Nurius

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Kevin King

  5. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Deborah Gorman-Smith

  6. University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    David B. Henry

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  1. Dana M. Prince
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Correspondence to Dana M. Prince.

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Prince, D.M., Epstein, M., Nurius, P.S. et al. Assessing Future Expectations of Low-Income Minority Young Men: Survival-Threats and Positive Expectations. J Child Fam Stud 25, 2089–2101 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-016-0384-y

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