Diverse Patterns in the Development of Depressive Symptoms Among Emerging Adults

This article examines depressive symptoms over a 4-year period in a racially diverse community sample of 1,143 18- to 22-year-old emerging adults using latent growth and mixture modeling and data collected at three time points. Participants were high school seniors randomly chosen from nine public schools in a metropolitan region in the Northeastern United States. Mixture analyses yielded four distinct groups: one large group with low, stable rates of depression, a smaller group who began with higher levels of depression that then declined steeply, a group who began with moderate levels that steeply increased, and a small group with high stable rates of depressive symptoms. We examined risks for depressive symptoms including poverty status, African American race, Hispanic ethnicity, gender, and trauma history, controlling for socioeconomic status (SES) as represented by maternal education. Some risks predicted membership in more than one symptom group, lending support to the idea that emerging adulthood is a period of diverse outcomes, in which previous circumstances may predict to multiple pathways, and established risk factors do not always lead to poor outcomes.