Depression During Early Adolescence:Developmental Trajectories And Relations With Family Conflict And Resilience

In this study,taking family system theory and development system theory as theoretical framework,a longitudinal research design was used.Three studies(six sub-studies)were used to examine the development trajectory of early depression among adolescents and the relationship between depression and family conflicts,individual factors(e.g.,resilience and previous depression).The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale,Family Conflict Scale and Resilience Scale were used for a three years follow-up survey.Eventually 1301 effective participants completed questionnaires from 2016(T1)to 2018(T3),including 666 boys,621 girls,and 14 students who did not report gender.The average age of the first test subjects was 12.46(SD = 0.63)years old.The SPSS,SPSS-process and Mplus 8.0 were used to analyze the data.The major findings were concluded as follow:(1)With the increase of the interval,the relative stability of early adolescent depression may increase.Meanwhile,the absolute stability of adolescent early depression stabilized first and then decreased slightly over time.(2)The general trajectory of depression during early adolescence showed a decreasing growth.There existed five heterogeneous sub-groups development trajectories by latent class growth analysis: the middle depression ascending,the worsening,the depression recovery,the depression high-risk,and the persistent non-depression sub-group.The distribution ratio of participants was 2.38%,6.15%,4.15% and 67.64%,respectively.(3)Compared with adolescents in the persistent non-depression group,there were no significant gender differences with the other four groups of early depression development subgroups.The more family conflicts,the higher the possibility that adolescents would be classified into subgroups with the middle depression ascending,depression recovery,and depression high-risk rather than the persistent non-depressive sub-group.The more resilience,the higher the possibility that adolescents would be classified into subgroup with the persistent non-depressive sub-group rather than depression recovery,and depression high-risk subgroups.(4)Cross-lagged analyses showed that family conflicts unidirectional significantly predicted adolescent depression,while depression would not significantly predict family conflicts.In addition,resilience significantly predicted adolescent depression,vice versa.(5)The previous depression could not only direct significantly affect their following depression,but also moderate the relationship between previous family conflicts and following adolescent depression.(6)The variables at Time 1,including gender,age,family conflicts,resilience and depression,were set as correlated.After the baseline of the outcomes was controlled,the 3-year longitudinal study indicated that T1 family conflicts could predict T2 resilience,which in turn could predict T3 adolescent depression.