Maartje Boer

SMU AND MENTAL HEALTH 171 6 reported differential developmental trajectories regarding all eight measures, which is a prerequisite for studying their associations over time. Girls reported higher averages in SMU problems, SMU intensity, depressive symptoms, upward social comparisons, and face-to-face contact, and lower averages in life satisfaction and cybervictimization than boys. Adolescents who attended pre-vocational education reported higher levels of SMU problems, SMU intensity, cybervictimization, and face-to-face contact, and lower levels of upward social comparison and subjective school achievements than adolescents who attended pre-university education. Adolescents who attended intermediate education showed higher reports of SMU problems, cybervictimization, and face-to-face contact, and lower reports of subjective school achievements than adolescents who attended pre-university education. Finally, immigrant adolescents reported lower levels of subjective school achievements and less face-to-face contact than non-immigrant adolescents. The revealed associations between adolescents’ demographics and the study measures do not influence the bidirectional associations from our main analyses, as the RI-CLPM controls for all possible stable confounders (Hamaker et al., 2015). Direct Cross-Lagged Associations Between SMU and Mental Health Table 6.3 reports the within-person auto-regressive and cross-lagged associations between SMU intensity, SMU problems, depressive symptoms (M1a), and life satisfaction (M2a). Both models had excellent model fit (M1a: CFI = 0.997, TLI = 0.980, RMSEA = 0.043, SRMR = 0.010; M2a: CFI = 0.996, TLI = 0.975, RMSEA = 0.047, SRMR = 0.011). SMU Intensity and Mental Health The cross-lagged associations between SMU intensity and both mental health indicators were all non-significant. This means that adolescents whose SMU intensity increased did not report increased depressive symptoms or decreased lifesatisfactiononeyear later. Reversely, adolescentswhosedepressivesymptoms increased, or whose life satisfaction decreased, did not report increased SMU intensity one year later. Thus, conform our expectations, SMU intensity and mental health were not associated in any direction.