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BACKGROUND: According to the "differential vulnerability hypothesis," individuals in adverse socioeconomic circumstances as less mentally resilient to stressful events. However, several recent papers radically challenged this hypothesis based on the accumulated literature on stress inoculation and presented cases in which lower-SES adolescents appear to be less vulnerable to suicidal ideation in the face of interpersonal aggression. OBJECTIVE: We re-examine the link between psychological vulnerability to acute stressors and SES using yearly longitudinal public survey data from South Korea. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: This is a secondary data analysis of a multi-year public health panel dataset on South Korean adolescents. METHODS: Logistic regression is used to examine the association between suicidal ideation and a range of predictor variables, with a particular focus on the interaction between bullying victimhood and log family income. These variables and the sample were chosen for consistency with recent revisionist research. RESULTS: We reaffirm the well-established finding that bullying victimhood strongly and consistently increases the odds of suicidal ideation (OR = 1.859, p < 0.01). However, we find no evidence in favor of the traditional "differential vulnerability hypothesis" or the recently proposed counterhypothesis. A subsample analysis from the latest wave (W4-W5) did produce results that are consistent with recent revisionist findings, but we suggest this is likely a false positive. CONCLUSIONS: There appears to be no systematic association between SES and vulnerability to suicidal ideation in the face of peer aggression among South Korean adolescents. The claim that lower-SES adolescents may be more resilient to stressful events stands on limited empirical support.

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In the multilevel modeling literature, contextual effect is defined as or identified by the effect of the target group-level variable while controlling for the corresponding individual-level variable. This paper extends the notion of "contextual effects" (or "neighborhood" or "school" effects) to an interaction setting, such that the effect of one explanatory variable Xij on the outcome Yij is modeled as a function of a group-level 'moderating' or predisposing variable Zj* as well as its counterpart at the individual level Zij. Researchers frequently use regression models that only contain a cross-level interaction between Xij and Zj* to test contextual hypotheses in an interaction setting, but this modeling strategy is unable to discriminate the immediate rival hypothesis that attributes a causal role to the corresponding individual-level variable. This paper points out the prevalence of this type of fallacy through a review of past research on contextual determinants of psychiatric resilience. It is argued that the simple step of adding an appropriate individual-level interaction XijZij could help more robustly test substantive hypotheses about how neighborhood context alters the effect of proximal stressors on health outcomes.

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It is widely held in socio-behavioral studies of suicide that higher levels of stress and lower levels of economic status amplify suicidal vulnerability when confronted with a proximal stressor, reflecting the traditionally prevalent understanding in health psychology and sociology that associates adverse life circumstances with undesirable mental health outcomes. However, upon reflection, there are strong theoretical reasons to doubt that having more stress or being in a more stressful environment always increases suicidal vulnerability given the occurrence of a crisis. Using large nationally representative public survey data on South Korean adolescents, I show that the association between recent psychosocial crisis and suicidal ideation often gets stronger with more favorable levels of perceived stress and improving levels of family economic status. Overall, the increase in the probability of suicidal ideation from recent exposure to a psychosocial crisis is consistently the smallest around medium levels of stress or family economic status and larger at low or high levels. A supplementary exercise suggests that the identified moderation effects operate mainly in virtue of individual-level stress or family economic status in the relative absence of contextual influences at the school level. The findings present preliminary evidence of the stress inoculation hypothesis with regard to suicidal ideation. Research on suicidal vulnerability could benefit from increased attentiveness to the mechanisms through which being in an adverse or unfavorable life situation could protect against the suicide-inducing effects of proximal stressors.

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Communalizing colonial policies (CCPs) include a variety of practices that recognize and institutionalize communal difference among colonized populations, and several qualitative analyses find that they promoted postcolonial ethnic conflict. In contrast, the few quantitative analyses that explore this issue focus on several mechanisms, make conflicting claims, and provide mixed results, thereby suggesting that CCPs do not have general effects. Yet the quantitative findings might be inaccurate for several reasons: Some use the identity of the colonizer as a proxy for CCPs, others measure a CCP but have small samples with limited variation in the focal independent variable, and all of these analyses are unable to explore whether CCPs affect ethnic conflict through different and competing mechanisms. To address these limitations, we create four ideal types of CCPs, gather data on a CCP that conforms to each ideal type, and test the relationships between CCPs and ethnic civil warfare onset using the set of former British and French colonies. We find that a discriminatory CCP is associated with high odds of ethnic civil war onset, especially shortly after independence. Alternatively, differentiating and accommodating CCPs lack general relationships with ethnic civil war onset, and an empowering CCP is negatively related to ethnic warfare in most models.