Everyday perceptions of safety and racial disparities in hair cortisol concentration.

Black-White disparities in physiological stress during adolescence are increasingly evident but remain incompletely understood. We examine the role of real-time perceptions of safety in the context of everyday routines to gain insight into the sources of observed adolescent racial differences in chronic stress as measured by hair cortisol concentration (HCC). We combined social survey, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and hair cortisol data on 690 Black and White youth ages 11–17 from wave 1 of the Adolescent Health and Development in Context (AHDC) study to investigate racial differences in physiological stress. Individual-level, reliability-adjusted measures of perceived unsafety outside the home were drawn from a week-long smartphone-based EMA and tested for association with hair cortisol concentration. We observed a statistically significant interaction (p <.05) between race and perceptions of unsafety. For Black youth, perceived unsafety was associated with higher HCC (p <.05). We observed no evidence of an association between perceptions of safety and expected HCC for White youth. For youth who perceive their out-of-home activity locations to be consistently safe, the racial difference in expected HCC was not statistically significant. At the high end of perceived unsafety, however, Black-White differences in HCC were pronounced (0.75 standard deviations at the 95th percentile on perceived unsafety; p <.001). These findings call attention to the role of everyday perceptions of safety across non-home routine activity contexts in explaining race differences in chronic stress as assessed by hair cortisol concentrations. Future research may benefit from data on in situ experiences to capture disparities in psychological and physiological stress. • Black adolescents have substantially higher levels of hair cortisol concentration than White adolescents. • Real-time perceived unsafety is positively associated with hair cortisol concentration for Black youth, but not White youth. • At high levels of average perceived unsafety, racial differences in hair cortisol concentration are pronounced. • At low levels of perceived unsafety, we observe no statistically significant racial difference in hair cortisol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]