Codevelopment and Bidirectional Associations between Coping Styles and Depressive Symptoms in Chinese Adolescents: Convergent Findings across Levels of Analyses

The codevelopment of positive and negative coping styles and adolescent depression and their relationships at both the between-person and within-person levels remain poorly understood, particularly among adolescents in East Asia. This large-sample Chinese cohort study seeks to address these gaps through a three-wave design. A total of 4,548 Chinese high school students (50.70% female; M_age = 16.87, SD = 0.81) were surveyed at baseline. This study employed latent growth curve modeling (LGCM) and the random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM). Univariate LGCMs revealed, on average, a decline in both positive and negative coping styles and an increase in depressive symptoms. Parallel LGCMs demonstrated that, relative to other adolescents, adolescents reporting steeper decreases in positive coping styles and less steep decreases in negative coping styles reported steeper increases in depressive symptoms (between-person effects). In the RI-CLPM, which affords clearer temporal order and within-person causal inference, we found that (1) adolescents reporting more negative coping relative to their own average in a given wave reported more depressive symptoms in the next wave (unidirectional within-person effect) and (2) adolescents reporting more positive coping relative to their own average at T2 reported fewer depressive symptoms at T3, and vice versa (bidirectional within-person effects). These within-person lagged effects are generalizable across genders, having siblings or not, and being from rural areas vs. urban areas. In conclusion, this study underscores the nuanced and largely convergent relationships between coping styles and adolescent depressive symptoms across levels of analysis.