Financial hardship, socio-economic position and depression: Results from the PATH Through Life Survey
Thoughts
Connects with: @bray2001 @kahn2006 @weich1998
Annotations
butterworth2009 - p. 229
In contrast to income or poverty measures which infer exclusion from a lack of resources, financial hardship directly assesses the extent to which individuals or households lack goods, facilities or services or are unable to engage in activities (Whelan, 1993).
butterworth2009 - p. 229
Within the psychiatric literature, indicators of financial hardship have included access to a car, household overcrowding, ownership of household appliances, difficulty paying bills, difficulty purchasing food or clothing, having services/utilities disconnected, and structural housing problems (Lewis et al., 1998; Lorant et al., 2007; Mirowsky & Ross, 2001; Skapinakis et al., 2006; Weich & Lewis, 1998b, 1998a; Whelan, 1993).
butterworth2009 - p. 230
The data used for this analysis are from the Personality and Total Health (PATH) Through Life Study, a large longitudinal community survey measuring the health and well-being of three cohorts from Canberra and the neighbouring town of Queanbeyan in Southeastern Australia.
butterworth2009 - p. 231
The GDS comprises nine items assessing the presence of symptoms of depression in the past month. The continuous GDS score (0–9) was used as a measure of depression symptoms. In addition, a measure of likely depression was used to enable comparison with previous research that has used a categorical measure of depression caseness.
butterworth2009 - p. 231
A number of socio-demographic characteristics were included in the analyses, including cohort (age), gender, marital status (married or de facto relationship vs other), and presence of dependent children (aged under 15) in the household. Physical disability (functional impairment due to physical health) was assessed using the physical health score from the SF-12. The RAND scoring method (Hays, 1998) was used.
butterworth2009 - p. 231
four dichotomous hardship items included in wave 2 of the survey that assessed lack of basic goods and opportunities due to a lack of financial resources (over the past year have the following happened because you were short of money: pawned or sold something; went without meals, unable to heat home, asked for help from welfare/community organisations).
butterworth2009 - p. 231
a summary measure representing any experience of hardship (one or more of the individual items) is used in multivariate analysis
butterworth2009 - p. 231
A number of other markers of contemporaneous (wave 2) socioeconomic status were used in this analysis to examine the general association between social position and depression and to enable evaluation of the independent contribution of hardship. The specific wave 2 measures included: labour-force status (employed, unemployed or not participating in the labour force); educational attainment (years of full-time education corresponding with highest level of educational attainment) and housing tenure (rental vs mortgage vs other). In addition, a measure of childhood adversity was derived from an item from wave 1 which asked respondents whether they had ‘‘grown up in poverty’’
butterworth2009 - p. 231
The multiple imputation procedure ICE available in Stata 9.0 was used to impute missing data using the multiple imputation by chained equations procedure (Royston, 2004).
butterworth2009 - p. 232
The reported analyses used the dichotomised depression measure to promote consistency with much of the previous literature which has considered psychiatric caseness.