In their own words: Finding meaning in girls' experiences of puberty

The present study pairs narrative meaning‐making with topic modeling to richly capture how girls choose to describe their experiences of change during puberty and to establish how these narratives map onto depressive symptoms. Participants (N = 125 girls; Mage = 11.61 years; 90.40% White) wrote about changes during puberty and reported their level of pubertal development, relationships, and mood. The relationship between meaning‐making and depressive symptoms was negatively moderated by early pubertal timing (d = .31) and positively moderated by more advanced pubertal status (d = .36). Exploratory analyses indicated that writing proportionally more about menstruation‐related changes had a small effect on subsequent depressive symptoms (f2 = .12). Results provide a conceptual and methodological update to decades‐old, landmark qualitative findings on girls' perceptions and assessments of experiences at puberty.