Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to depression. This longitudinal study examines gender differences in the developmental trajectories of depressive symptoms and investigates how school bullying victimization influences these trajectories across genders. A total of 1,260 adolescents (58.3% female) participated in this study. Bullying victimization and depressive symptoms were measured by self-report at three waves spaced 6 months apart. We used gender as a grouping variable and fit two-level hierarchical linear models (HLM). Level 1 represented within-person change over time, while level 2 modeled between-person factors, including three types of bullying victimization. HLM results indicated that girls had a higher mean baseline level of depressive symptoms than boys. Depressive symptoms increased over time among boys (β = 0.566, p = 0.006) but decreased among girls (β = −0.618, p < 0.001). At baseline, physical bullying (β = 2.894, p = 0.001) and relational bullying (β = 2.336, p = 0.002) were associated with higher depressive symptoms in boys. In girls, relational bullying was associated with higher baseline depressive symptoms (β = 3.715, p < 0.001) and a more negative time slope (β = −1.023, p = 0.004). This study revealed the relationships between depression and different forms of bullying between male and female adolescents, providing insights for developing personalized strategies to reduce adolescent depression by considering individual-level factors and longitudinal changes over time.
Liu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.