Hypothesis testing was performed in accordance with Woltman et al. (2012). Therefore, both unconditional and conditional models were specified. The comparison between these models was undertaken by means of χ2- statistics, comparing the reduction in deviance as a measure of model fit. As an indicator of explained variance, pseudo-R2 is reported, calculated in accordance with the formula [(σ2(unconditional growth model) - σ2(subsequent model))/σ2(unconditional growth model)] (Singer and Willett, 2003). Mediation analyses were performed using the stepwise procedure as recommended by Kenny et al. (2003), Korchmaros and Kenny (unpublished).
P-values of ≤0.05 were considered significant. For all analyses, unstandardized coefficients (UC) are reported.