Social contacts and depression in middle and advanced adulthood: Findings from a US national survey, 2005–2008
Lindsey E McKenzie,
Ram N Polur,
Cholrelia Wesley,
Jessica D Allen,
Robert E McKeown and
Jian Zhang
International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 2013, vol. 59, issue 7, 627-635
Abstract:
Aim: Empirical evidence has linked social contacts with mental stability. The aim is to assess how social contacts are associated with depression among the general population. Methods: We analysed the data of 5,681 adults aged 40 or older, who completed a depression screening as a part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2005–2008. Depression was ascertained using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ), a nine-item screening instrument asking about the frequency of depression symptoms over the past two weeks. A PHQ score of 10 or higher was defined as depression. Results: The prevalence of depression was 5.54% (SE = 0.64) and 8.49% (SE = 0.71), respectively, among men and women. The association between social contacts and depression were more salient among men than women. The odds ratios (ORs) of depression were 2.43 (95% CI = 1.44−4.10), 2.42 (95% CI = 1.37−4.28), 1.00 (reference) and 1.94 (95% CI = 0.80−4.71), respectively, among men who never attended church, attended occasionally, weekly and more than weekly. The corresponding ORs were 1.79 (95% CI = 1.10−2.91), 1.72 (95% CI = 1.06−2.80), 1.00(reference) and 0.98 (95% CI = 0.52−1.84) for women. Compared with the respondents who had 10 or more friends, the ORs of depression were 4.01 (95% CI = 1.89−8.50) and 1.86 (95% CI = 0.92−3.79), respectively, for men and women who had no close friends. Conclusions: The current study concluded that traditional social contacts remain strongly associated with depression in the digital era. Digital social networking is one of the biggest growing industries, creating a new platform to make social contacts. There is an urgent need to explore how to maximize the potential of digital social networking to strengthen social bonds while minimizing its negative effects.
Keywords: Social network; depression; gender; religion; marriage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0020764012463302 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socpsy:v:59:y:2013:i:7:p:627-635
DOI: 10.1177/0020764012463302
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in International Journal of Social Psychiatry
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().