Decades of studies have demonstrated that residing in impoverished and dangerous neighborhoods places youth at risk for many maladaptive outcomes, including poor academic performance and psychopathology (Campbell et al., 2000; Winslow & Shaw, 2007; Wodtke et al., 2011). Even so, a large proportion of exposed youth (approximately 40-60%; Vanderbilt-Adriance & Shaw, 2008) evidence resilience, or successful adaptation and competence in the face of adversity. The high prevalence of resilience is a cause for optimism, not only because it focuses scientific attention on children’s strengths in the face of chronic stressors, but also because resilient youth provide a model of successful adaptation that could be used to enhance policy and interventions for non-resilient youth facing similar adversity. Despite its promise, however, little is known about the developmental trajectories that characterize resilience or the specific biological mechanisms underlying those trajectories. The studies in this dissertation thus sought to bridge these gaps in the resilience literature. Study 1 employed variable and person-centered approaches to elucidate the development of social and psychological resilience and identify the socioecological factors that promote their development. Generally, youth were characterized by increasing trajectories of social and psychological resilience; when examined using growth mixture models, however, we found evidence of three psychological resilience trajectories and two social resilience trajectories. Parental nurturance, neighborhood social cohesion, neighborhood informal social control, and sex predicted psychological resilience trajectory class membership, while race/ethnicity and parental nurturance predicted social resilience trajectory class membership. Study 2 focused on evaluating the role of DNA Methylation (DNAm) as a specific biological mechanism undergirding youth resilience. We performed a series of methylome-wide association analyses to evaluate whether DNAm was associated with social and psychological resilience growth factors. We identified only one differentially methylated probe (DMP) for the social resilience intercept and multiple suggestive DMPs for each outcome. We then leveraged a monozygotic twin difference design to circumvent genetic confounds; only five top DMPs for the social resilience intercept were significant, suggesting that these were environmental in origin while remaining DMPs for all outcomes appear to be genetically or developmentally mediated. Finally, pathway analyses revealed multiple enriched pathways implicated in the social resilience intercept and slope. Our findings ultimately suggest that DNAm may play at most a modest role in the development of youth resilience, particularly in the psychological domain.This set of studies ultimately facilitated greater insight into the development of resilience during prominent developmental transitions. While we identified socioecological factors that promote resilience development, we were unable to identify clear biological mechanisms undergirding resilience trajectories over time. Finally, future directions for the resilience literature more broadly are discussed, including work that: 1) further elucidates developmental patterns of resilience, 2) investigates other potential biological mechanisms influencing resilience, and 3) begins to meaningfully incorporate multicultural and social justice considerations.
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