Frontiers in Psychology：感知社区资源与哥伦比亚农村岛屿青少年生活满意度的关联

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Positive Psychology

Abstract

Adolescents' life satisfaction is embedded in social and physical environments that may provide support, safety, belonging, and opportunities for participation. This study examined whether perceived neighborhood assets were associated with life satisfaction after accounting for sociodemographic, relational, adaptive, and emotional characteristics. A cross-sectional study was conducted with 313 students aged 12–19 years (M = 14.26, SD = 1.80) attending a public school in a predominantly Afro-Colombian rural island community of Cartagena, Colombia. Participants completed measures of life satisfaction, perceived neighborhood assets, peer attachment, psychosocial adaptation, and perceived emotional intelligence. Scale scores were calculated using predefined item-completion criteria, and remaining missing scores were handled through multiple imputation by chained equations using 50 imputed datasets. Hierarchical linear regression was used to estimate the incremental contribution of perceived neighborhood assets. Age and sex explained 0.7% of the variance in life satisfaction. Adding peer attachment, psychosocial adaptation, Emotional Attention, Emotional Clarity, and Emotional Repair increased the explained variance to 3.7%, but this block did not significantly improve model fit, pooled F(5, 302.05) = 1.74, p = .125. Adding perceived neighborhood assets increased the explained variance to 6.4% (ΔR² = .027) and significantly improved model fit, pooled F(1, 299.70) = 8.40, p = .004. A more favorable appraisal of neighborhood assets was associated with higher life satisfaction (B = 0.0456, SE = 0.0157, 95% CI [0.0146, 0.0765], β = .168, p = .004). Complete-case and observed-outcome sensitivity analyses produced comparable estimates. Perceived neighborhood assets showed a modest association with adolescents' life satisfaction beyond the other characteristics considered. Longitudinal and multisite studies are needed to examine how structural conditions and adolescents' experiences of their residential communities jointly relate to subjective well-being.

Keywords

adolescence, Colombia, life satisfaction, perceived neighborhood assets, rural island community, Subjective well-being

Received

08 September 2026

Accepted

30 September 2026

Copyright

© 2026 Pardo, De La Ossa Robinson, Noreña and Silva. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence:

Disclaimer

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.