Is High Family SES Positively Associated with Youth Adjustment in the Absence of Parent–Child Genetic Connection?

In this paper, we examined whether high family SES had a net benefit on 12–21 years old youth’s adjustment in the absence of parent–child genetic connection. We compared 137 female youth who were adopted from China into the United States, with 90 non-adopted female youth who lived in China, as well as 69 non-adopted American female youth of diverse racial backgrounds. All three groups were from high SES families. The participants completed the third edition of the Behavioral Assessment for Children-Self Report of Personality (BASC-3-SRP). Eight subscales from the BASC-3-SRP that demonstrated cross-cultural measurement equivalence were compared across the three groups. We found that of the eight subscales, the adopted youth outperformed the two non-adopted groups on seven, but did not underperform on any; while the two non-adopted groups did not perform differently from each other on five subscales but performed differently on the other three. These results offered evidence that high SES has a net effect on youth adjustment even in the absence of parent–child genetic connection.