Life satisfaction among low-income rural youth from Appalachia

The purpose of this study was to examine the relative strength of objective, subjective, and congruency variables as predictors of life satisfaction among low-income youth from rural areas. A 10-year longitudinal survey of low:income, rural youth from Appalachia (n=322) was conducted to explore these issues. Although support was provided for variables representing all three types of life satisfaction predictors, the strongest of these were subjective variables such as self-perceptions about goal attainment in jobs, overall goal attainment in life, and self-esteem Another set of consistent predictors of life satisfaction, congruence variables, were concerned with the extent to which low-income youth believed that they had fulfilled their own aspirations in terms of formal education, proximity to their childhood homes, and number of children, Finally, some of the objective variables consisting of family of origin's SES, community size, and marital status also were predictive of life satisfaction. In general, the life satisfaction of low-income, rural youth seemed to be influenced more extensively by personal meanings shaped within a particular cultural context rather than by traditional objective measures of life circumstances. (C) 1997 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents.