Residential instability during adolescence and health and wellbeing in adulthood: A longitudinal outcome-wide study

Although prior research suggests that residential instability during adolescence can have long-term impacts on health and wellbeing, few studies have identified a robust comparison group and considered a broad set of outcomes. To address these knowledge gaps, we examined the associations between residential instability during adolescence and a wide range of adult health and wellbeing outcomes using an outcome-wide design in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. We defined residential instability as two or more moves between Waves I and II (ages 13–18 years). We assessed outcomes at ages 33–43 years (Wave V) in nine domains: biomarkers, physical health, health behaviors, psychological distress, psychological wellbeing, social behaviors, social wellbeing, trauma/victimization, and socioeconomic attainment. Results of doubly-robust targeted maximum likelihood estimation, adjusting for pre-exposure values of the outcome variables and cofounders (Wave I), showed little evidence of an association for certain outcomes, all of which disappeared after accounting for multiple comparisons. Our results suggest that residential instability in adolescence does not lead to worse health and wellbeing in adulthood, but rather, outcome differences between groups are due to pre-existing differences prior to residential instability in adolescence. •We evaluated if residential instability during adolescence changes later outcomes.•We took an outcome-wide approach to examine outcomes at ages 33–43 years.•We used targeted maximum likelihood estimation.•We did not find strong evidence of the association for any outcomes.