This proposed study will examine in detail the relationship between poverty and psychological distress. The project's goals are (a) to develop a richer understanding of the consequences of the changing nature of poverty for the mental health of the poor in the United States; (b) to construct and estimate models that examine how various dimensions of poverty are associated with measures of psychological distress, focusing on indicators of depressive symptomology; and (c) to use these models to further our knowledge about the experiences of two important groups of poor persons: single mothers receiving public assistance and the rural poor. Two large, nationally representative data sets-the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the National Survey of Families and Households-will be utilized. The first part of our study will examine the relationship between poverty and psychological distress focusing on the following hypotheses: (1) Persistent poverty has more deleterious mental health consequences than transitional poverty; (2) Poor persons living in high-poverty areas experience greater distress than those not living in high-poverty areas; and (3) The nonworking poor have more severe psychological problems than the working poor. In the second part of our investigation, we will turn our attention to issues that are more specific to subpopulations of the poor. With regard to women reliant on public assistance, we hypothesize that (4) Women who receive public assistance will experience more psychological distress than women who receive benefits from other non-stigmatized program; and (5) The mental health consequences of employment among welfare recipients depend on the quality of the job, including wages and benefits, job security and future prospects. With regard to the rural poor, we will evaluate the claims that (6) Overall levels of psychological distress experienced by the poor are comparable across rural and urban communities; (7) The rural poor living in high-poverty areas will have more severe mental health problems than otherwise; and (8) Rural poverty is more detrimental for Blacks than for Whites. The main method we will use to assess these hypotheses is multivariate analysis that treats the outcome variables-depressive symptomology based mainly on the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) and the Pearlin Mastery scale-as both discrete and continuous. We will also exploit the longitudinal design of the National Survey of Families and Households to analyze the effects of changes in poverty status on levels of psychological distress.
| Petterson, Stephen M (2003) Metropolitan-nonmetropolitan differences in amount and type of mental health treatment. Arch Psychiatr Nurs 17:12-9 |
| Petterson, S M; Friel, L V (2001) Psychological distress, hopelessness and welfare. Women Health 32:79-99 |
| Petterson, S M; Albers, A B (2001) Effects of poverty and maternal depression on early child development. Child Dev 72:1794-813 |
