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This study aimed to explore changes in mental health outcomes (depression, anxiety, home, and school stress) from before the first COVID-19 wave (autumn 2019) to the later stages of the same wave (autumn 2020) in a sample of N = 377 Swiss adolescents (Mage = 12.67; 47% female). It also examined whether students’ background characteristics (gender, immigrant status, and socio-economic status) and reported COVID-19 burden predicted students’ outcomes and their intra-individual changes. Student’s mental health, background characteristics, and reported COVID-19 burden were assessed by a self-report questionnaire. The intra-individual changes in students’ scores were estimated using random coefficients regression analyses, with time points nested in individuals. To examine the effects of predictors (students’ background characteristics and the reported COVID-19 burden) on outcome scores and changes, multilevel intercepts-and-slopes-as-outcomes models were used. The results showed that the expected impact of the pandemic on mental health was not noticeable in the later stages of the first COVID-19 wave. Only two effects were demonstrated in terms of intra-individual changes, namely, an effect of gender on depression and anxiety symptoms and an effect of reported COVID-19 burden on school stress symptoms. Moreover, few associations were found for selected predictors and students’ mean level scores, averaged across both time points.

Internationally, about 25% of all children experience physical abuse by their parents. Despite the numerous odds against them, about 30% of adolescents who have experienced even the most serious forms of physical abuse by their parents escape the vicious family violence cycle. In this study, we analyzed longitudinally the data from a sample of N = 1767 seventh-grade high school students in Switzerland on physical abuse by their parents. We did this by conducting an online questionnaire twice within the school year. We found that in our sample, about 30% of the participating adolescents’ parents had physically abused them. We considered violence resilience a multi-systemic construct that included the absence of psychopathology on one hand and both forms of well-being (psychological and subjective) on the other. Our latent construct included both feeling good (hedonic indicators, such as high levels of self-esteem and low levels of depression/anxiety and dissociation) and doing well (eudaimonic indicators, such as high levels of self-determination and self-efficacy as well as low levels of aggression toward peers). By applying a person-oriented analytical approach via latent transition analysis with a sub-sample of students who experienced physical abuse (nw2 = 523), we identified and compared longitudinally four distinct violence-resilience patterns and their respective trajectories. By applying to the field of resilience, one of the most compelling insights of well-being research (Deci & Ryan, 2001), we identified violence resilience as a complex, multidimensional latent construct that concerns hedonic and eudaimonic well-being and is not solely based on terms of psychopathology.

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