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Individual Differences in the Stability and Change of Childhood Depression: A Growth Mixture Model With Structured Residuals.

Matt HawrilenkoKatherine E MasynJanine CeruttiErin C Dunn
Published in: Child development (2021)
Studies of developmental trajectories of depression are important for understanding depression etiology. Existing studies have been limited by short time frames and no studies have explored a key factor: differential patterns of responding to life events. This article introduces a novel analytic technique, growth mixture modeling with structured residuals, to examine the course of youth depression in a large, prospective cohort (N = 11,641, ages 4-16.5, 96% White). Age-specific critical points were identified at ages 8 and 13 where depression symptoms spiked for a minority of children. Most depression risk was due to dynamic responses to environmental events, drawn not from a small pool of persistently depressed children, but a larger pool of children who varied across higher and lower symptom levels.
Keyphrases
  • depressive symptoms
  • sleep quality
  • young adults
  • mental health