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Predicting Children’s Depressive Symptoms from Community and Individual Risk Factors

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Abstract

Community, demographic, familial, and personal risk factors of childhood depressive symptoms were examined from an ecological theoretical approach using hierarchical linear modeling. Individual-level data were collected from an ethnically diverse (73% African-American) community sample of 197 children and their parents; community-level data were obtained from the U.S. Census regarding rates of community poverty and unemployment in participants’ neighborhoods. Results indicated that high rates of community poverty and unemployment, children’s depressive attributional style, and low levels of self-perceived competence predict children’s depressive symptoms, even after accounting for demographic and familial risk factors, such as parental education and negative parenting behaviors. The effect of negative parenting behaviors on depressive symptoms was partially mediated by personal variables like children’s self-perceived competence. Recommendations for future research, intervention and prevention programs are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Depressive attributional style per se is the risk factor, which like gender, ethnicity, poverty, etc. is not sufficient to cause depression, but does serve to increase risk. On these grounds, we believe we are justified in treating attributional style per se as a singular risk factor. Furthermore, our analysis of the attributional style by negative life events interaction with this same dataset reveals non-significant results up until age 14.

  2. After testing the between community variance for the slope of each predictor variable and finding them to be non-significant, we fixed the variance of each to be zero, or the same across the communities in this sample.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by grant numbers R01MH64650 from the National Institute on Mental Health and P30HD15052 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the second author and Vanderbilt University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, The College of William and Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA, 23187, USA

    Danielle H. Dallaire

  2. Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    David A. Cole, Thomas M. Smith, Jeffrey A. Ciesla, Beth LaGrange, Farrah M. Jacquez, Ashley Q. Pineda, Alanna E. Truss & Amy S. Folmer

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  1. Danielle H. Dallaire
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  2. David A. Cole
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Correspondence to Danielle H. Dallaire.

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Dallaire, D.H., Cole, D.A., Smith, T.M. et al. Predicting Children’s Depressive Symptoms from Community and Individual Risk Factors. J Youth Adolescence 37, 830–846 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-008-9270-2

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