The Role of Social Support and Income on Depression

418 Words2 Pages
The role of social support and income on depression. Background The relationship between socioeconomic status and depression has long been investigated (Pickett, 2001). This link has been found to affect many aspects of society - well developed as well as low-income nations (Myer, Stein, Grimsrud, Seedat & Williams, 2008) and men as well as women (Smith, Matheson, Moineddin & Glazier, 2007). Some studies have taken this further to include social support in their investigations. It has been shown that low levels of family adaptability and cohesion increase the rate of suicide attempts (Compton, Thompson & Kaslow, 2005) and that the role of husband and in-laws was shown to be significantly associated with depression in women (Kazi, et al. 2006) This study will be looking at the association between income and social support, in particular, family size on depression. On the basis of past evidence, my hypothesis would be that Family size and income will be negatively correlated with depression. Method Our study is based on the findings of Brummett, Barefoot, Vitaliano, & Siegler (2003), though this study has a large sample and we decided to see if it could be replicated on a smaller specific group of society, those aged 18-30. Studies have used many different ways to define social support, such as the family relationships index (North, Holahan, Moos, & Cronkite, 2008), we decided to be more specific and chose to concentrate on how many family members they were in direct contact with in the period of a month. 60 participants took part in the experiment with an age range of 18-30 with an equal amount of men and women taking part. There were restrictions in that they must have their own income. For this study our independent variables will be family size and income. The dependant variable is depression. These are continuous variables measured on
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