Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESEmergence of Gender Differences in Depression During Adolescence: National Panel Results From Three Countries
Section snippets
Samples
National Population Health Survey—Canada. In a two-stage, stratified, random sampling procedure designed to ensure adequate representation across major urban centers, smaller towns, and rural areas in all provinces, 19,600 households from across Canada were initially selected in the first wave of the National Population Health Survey (NPHS) (Statistics Canada, 1996;Tambay and Catlin, 1995). Wave 1 data were collected between June 1994 and June 1995; wave 2 data were collected between June 1996
RESULTS
Table 1 illustrates the commonly observed gender gap between males and females across all waves for each survey regardless of which measure was used. In the NPHS, females were twice as likely to report an episode of MDD within the past 12 months in wave 1. This increased in wave 2, with females being 3 times more likely to report an episode of MDD. Among respondents in both the BYP and the AddHealth, females were more than twice as likely to score in the top decile across all waves and had
DISCUSSION
In support of previous work (Baron and Joly, 1988;Cairney, 1998;Hankin et al., 1998;Kandel and Davies, 1986;Peterson et al., 1991), this analysis identifies differences in depression between males and females emerging by age 14. The emergence of this gender gap is captured by both diagnostic instruments and categorical cutpoints of depression scales, consistent with studies of adult depression (Kessler, 1998;Nolen-Hoeksema, 1987;Nolen-Hoeksema and Girgus, 1994;Wade and Cairney, 1997, Wade and
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Cited by (0)
Data come from the National Population Health Survey conducted by Statistics Canada, the British Household Panel Survey conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health conducted by the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The authors thank Marie P. Beaudet and Colette Koeune at Statistics Canada for their assistance with the NPHS.