Original articleA multilevel analysis of the relation of socioeconomic status to adolescent depressive symptoms: does school context matter?☆
Section snippets
Sample descriptions
This study uses data collected as part of Wave 1 (1995) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Add Health is a comprehensive, nationally representative, school-based study of US adolescents in grades 7 through 12.20 The hierarchical nature of our research questions and these data create two samples, one sample of individuals who are nested within a second sample of schools. There were 13,285 youths in the weighted, in-home interview, whose parents provided income
Description of the samples
Table I provides descriptive statistics related to both the individual adolescent and the school-level samples. The majority of adolescents were white, but the distribution is comparable to that of 1995 US Census data. Two thirds came from families without a college-educated parent. Almost 1 in 10 adolescents (9.2%) had a CES-D score above the cut-point predictive of major depressive disorder.27 The individual-level median household income was $40,000, close to the median school-level income.
Discussion
These data indicate that even when controlling for individual household income, school-level income measures are associated with depressive symptoms among youth. Our data support prior studies that have shown significant effects of individual-level SES indicators on adolescent depressive symptomatology.19., 28., 29., 30. To our knowledge, however, no prior studies have assessed contextual effects of SES on adolescents' depressive symptoms. Although the effects were small, we found that
Acknowledgements
We thank Jack P. Shonkoff, Ardythe L. Morrow, and Robert C. Whitaker for comments on earlier versions of this paper. This research uses data from the Add Health project, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry (PI) and Peter Bearman and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Persons interested in obtaining
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2020, Health and PlaceCitation Excerpt :Using this broad school SES construct that captures human and social factors, we may overlook the direct impact of other school socioeconomic indicators such as school poverty, family structure or students' residential mobility. Future research may consider using alternative measures of school SES and analyze their separate and joint impact on students' wellbeing (Ensminger et al., 2000; Entwislea and Astone, 1994; Goodman et al., 2003). Second, we used students' depressive symptom score as a measure of mental health and illicit drug use as a measure of behavioral health.
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Supported in part by a Faculty Scholar's Award from the William T. Grant Foundation (E. G.) and grant K23 HD40362-01 from NICHD (R. S. K.).