| Being a typical kind of internalizing problem, depression is pervasive duringearly adolescence. And early adolescence, a special transitional stage, is also adangerous factor for adolescents'depression. Depression during early adolescencewould bring poor prognosis, increasing the risk to education, employment and otherantisocial behaviors in the future. Existing researches mostly concerned about thecomorbidity of anxiety and depression, and the clinical level of depression ofadolescents, few researchers paid attention to depressive emotion of common group.In addition, those longitudinal studies about adolescents'depression were mainlybased on western cultural context, and most Chinese scholars studied thedevelopmental characteristics of adolescents'depression with cross-sectional studydesign. So it was an important issue to explore how depression changes with age, andhow environment factors interact with individual, and whether gender differencesexist by longitudinal design in our contemporary context.This thesis was to explore the developmental characteristics and relevantinfluencing factors of adolescents'depression that were derived from adolescentsself-report by individual-centered and variable-centered analytical orientations in alongitudinal design. The perspective of developmental psychopathology anddevelopmental systemism theories were used as theoretical framework. This thesiscontained two studies. Study 1 was designed to investigate the developmentalcharacteristics of adolescents'depression, including two sub-studies, in which study1-a was to explore the average trajectory and heterogeneous subgroup trajectories ofdepression by individual-centered orientation, and study 1-b was to examine theStability and change with age of depression during early adolescence byvariable-centered analytic orientation; Study 2 was designed to investigate thepredictors of depression during early adolescence, containing two sub-studies, inwhich study 2-a was to describe the developmental trends of maternal parenting, friendship quality, self-concept and previous depression and examine whether theabove variables could explain the variance of the subgroup trajectories usingindividual-centered orientation, and study 2-b was to examine the relationshipbetween depression and maternal parenting, friendship quality, self-concept andprevious depression by variable-centered orientation. Gerder difference would beanalysed in the studies mentioned above.Data used in this thesis was derived from the database of a longitudinal researchproject of development of the social behavior of children and adolescents and itsrelation to the school adjustment. Eventually 1818 anticipants who completedquestionnaires from 2008 (T1) to 2011 (T4) were selected as effective formal ones,including 918 boys with average age of 14.33±0.35, and 900 girls with average age of14.26±0.34. Depression Inventory of Youth Self Report (YSR), Self-ConceptQuestionnaire, Friend Relationship Questionnaire were administered on adolescents,and mothers completed the questionnaire of Parenting Style and the index of familySocio-Economic Status measures containing monthly income, parental occupation,parental educational level. Epdata3.1 procedure and SPSS13.0,Amos7.0, SAS 9.1,Mplus6.0 software packages were used to log and to analyze the data. The majorfindings were as followes:(1) Depression during early adolescence showed an increasing growth. Thereexisted four heterogeneous sub-groups developmental trajectories by latent classgrowth analysis: the low growth, the low stable, an increasing-stable high-level andnon-depressed sub-group. The distribution ratio of anticipants was 27.4%, 49.2%,4.1% and 19.3%, respectively.(2) Adolescents with increasing depression scored lower on self-concept, friendcompanionships, friend affective support and maternal warmth parenting than thosenon-depression ones, and stable low-level sub-group of adolescents reported moreannoyance and conflict between friends.(3) The higher level of self-concept adolescents had, the greater possibilityadolescents were distributed to no-depression sub-group trajectory. The moreannoyance and conflict existed between friends, the greater possibility thatadolescents would be classified into subgroups with increasing trend of depression.Friend intimacy could increase the possibility that adolescents belong to subgroupswith increasing trend of depression rather than no-depression one. (4) The previous level of depression was not only a direct predictor variable, butalso was a moderating one. Specifically, the previous depression of adolescents couldpredict significantly their following depression, and could moderate the relationshipbetween maternal parenting style and friendship quality and the following depression.(5) The integrated structure of relations model was constructed to describe thecomplex relationship between adolescents'depression and maternal parenting style,friendship quality, self-concept and the previous depression, within which theself-concept not only played a mediator between maternal parenting style, friendshipquality and adolescents'following depression, but also was moderated by adolescents'previous depression. That is, the self-concept was a moderated-mediating variable foradolescents'following depression.In this thesis, there were still some limitations. Firstly, anticipants in this studywere mostly from families with high socioeconomic status, which made it impossibleto investigate how disadvantaged environment and the changes of environmentalfactors influence adolescents'depression across time. Secondly, too many variablesincluded in this study not only increased the difficulties in statistical analysis, but alsomade it difficult to explore the complex relationship between adoldescents'depressionand the environment factors. As such, it was necessary to use more scientific andeffective motheds to examine the relathionship between depression during earlyadolescence and the selected environmental factors in a sample from different familysocioeconomic status in the next step.
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