Figure 1.

The unspecified growth curve model for the trajectory of depressive symptoms of children across three annual assessments. The intercept, denoted as I, represents information concerning overall mean and variance of individual intercepts that characterize each individual's initial level of depressive symptoms. The slope (denoted as S) represents the trend of an individual's trajectory determined by the repeated assessments of depressive symptoms. The factor loadings of the intercept are fixed at 1. With the two factor loadings of slope fixed at 0 and 1, the third factor loading is allowed to be freely estimated (denoted as L in Figure 1). For the purpose of model identification, error variances associated with depressive symptoms across three years were constrained to be equal.