Past studies on major depression in different racial groups have yielded critical insights about mental illness in diverse communities. However, these studies have invariably treated racial groups as homogeneous categories rather than fully examining the heterogeneity within these groups. This is a revised R01 application by a New Junior Investigator that aims to investigate the social and psychological risk and protective factors for depression among African American, Caribbean Black, Asian American, Latino and White adults using existing national data. The proposed research will take advantage of comprehensive epidemiological data and sophisticated and innovative statistical methods to examine a wide range of risk and protective factors and their interactions, while also considering the heterogeneity within and between racial and ethnic groups. These relationships will be examined using the National Institute of Mental Health's Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES). The studies contain large samples of respondents of African American and Afro-Caribbean descent (National Survey of American Life), Latino and Asian descent (National Latino and Asian American Study), as well as a sample of the general population (National Comorbidity Study-Revised). The proposed application builds on previous research examining racial and ethnic health disparities in several important ways. First, it builds upon and advances previous empirical research on social relationships and depression by taking into account race/ethnicity, and immigration-related factors and how these factors influence the social relationships among diverse populations. Second, this research carefully focuses on the sociodemographic and other sources of heterogeneity that exist within and across these populations. Third, the proposed research will identify the pathways linking race and ethnicity to depression. This work is important in an etiologic sense, as it can lead to new knowledge about depression as a disease process across diverse populations. Finally, this research utilizes sophisticated statistical models to identify depression risk profiles by examining the social and contextual determinants of depression among a diverse sample of adults;which is important for identifying factors that define particular risk groups. The goal of this research is to identify those factors that will enhance current interventions, as well as provide information relevant to the development of new and innovative research-based interventions that meet the mental health needs of diverse populations.
Findings from the proposed investigation promise to increase our understanding of differences in risk and protective factors for different profiles of depression among diverse populations and will demonstrate a broader public health value in their utility in informing the design of targeted prevention and intervention programs for depression in adults that make use of existing, natural helping networks. More specifically, findings for the proposed research will inform the development, testing and translation of innovative interventions for adults with major depressive disorder. The goal of this research is to identify those factors that will enhance current interventions as well as develop new and innovative research-based interventions that meet the mental health needs of diverse populations.
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