Unequally Affected: Heterogeneous Responses to Societal Crisis Among Emerging Adults

Background and Purpose:

Emerging adulthood is a developmental period marked by substantial heterogeneity as individuals transition to adulthood under diverse socio-environmental conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted multiple life domains— including work, education, home life, social activities, economic security, mental health, and physical health — yet most research has largely examined these impacts at the aggregate level, treating emerging adults as a homogeneous group. This obscures meaningful variation in how crisis-related disruptions are experienced. This study addresses this gap by applying a person-centered approach to identify distinct patterns of multi-domain pandemic impact and examine how these patterns reflect underlying structural inequalities.

Methods:

Data were drawn from the Study of Adolescent Neural Development COVID-19 Supplement Study(N= 685; M age = 22.08, SD= 0.32). ; Latent profile analysis (LPA) was conducted using eight standardized subscale scores from the Epidemic-Pandemic Impacts Inventory (EPII). The optimal number of profiles was determined based on a convergence of statistical and substantive criteria, including the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), Entropy, minimum profile size, and theoretical interpretability of the resulting solution. Sociodemographic differences across profiles were examined using one-way ANOVA with Tukey's HSD post-hoc tests for continuous variables, and Fisher's Exact Tests with standardized residual analyses for categorical variables.

Results:

A four-profile solution provided optimal fit (AIC = 13974.27, BIC = 14,169.04, entropy = .82). The Low Impact Group (41.2%) showed minimal disruption across domains. The Moderate Impact Group (35.5%) demonstrated broadly distributed disruption, particularly in social domains. The Health and Emotional Impact Group (12.7%) exhibited elevated emotional and physical health disruption. The High Economic Impact Group (10.7%) showed severe economic disruption alongside elevated home life and work impacts. Profiles differed significantly on household income (p < .001), race/ethnicity (p = .001), education (p < .001), relationship status (p = .040), sexuality (p < .001), and poverty rate (p < .001).Notably, sexual minority emerging adults were disproportionately represented in the Health and Emotional Impact and High Economic Impact groups, while non-White emerging adults were overrepresented in the High Economic Impact group.

Conclusions and Implications:

COVID-19's impacts among emerging adults were not simply more or less severe but clustered into qualitatively distinct patterns shaped by structural position. These findings demonstrate how societal crises reproduce inequality across domains of life, rather than affecting populations uniformly. For social work research, this highlights the value of person-centered approaches in capturing heterogeneity in crisis experiences. For practice and policy, findings underscore the need for targeted, domain-specific interventions that address the intersecting structural conditions producing economic vulnerability among racial minority populations and emotional health burdens among sexual minority emerging adults.