The principal goal of this study is to determine potentially modifiable social support, socioeconomic, and health factors that are associated with depressive symptoms among mothers of young children, with a specific focus on the role of race and ethnicity. Maternal depression has been recognized to be more prevalent among African-Americans and among women in poverty, but little work has been done to identify factors beyond these sociodemographic variables, particularly to identify factors that may be amenable to intervention. The central hypothesis of this project is that factors contributing to maternal depression differ among racial and ethnic minorities and by income level. Clarifying these differences will form a foundation to develop interventions directed to underlying factors (e.g., maternal health, child health, social support and access to health care). The second objective is to analyze the effect of an innovative method for dealing with missing data in complex surveys. The third objective is to determine the effect of maternal depressive symptoms on child behavior, development and health at 3 years old. The fourth objective is to determine protective factors among children of mothers with chronic depressive symptoms (i.e., factors associated with age-appropriate child behavior and developmental outcomes despite maternal depressive symptoms). We will use the 1988 National Maternal and Infant Health Survey (NMIHS) and the 1991 Longitudinal Follow Up Survey (LF) to examine chronic maternal depressive symptoms, defined by a CES-D score >=16 in both surveys. Logistic regression analysis will explore the roles of social support and maternal and child health in the development and persistence of depressive symptoms among White, Black, and Hispanic mothers of young children. A variable that compares household income to the federal poverty threshold will be entered into the analysis. All analyses will be performed after redistributing statistical weights of cases with missing CES-D data to cases with complete data. The unique contribution of this study rests in its ability to focus on differences in factors associated with maternal depressive symptoms in racial and ethnic minorities and its focus on potentially modifiable factors that may be important in developing future interventions.
| Langkamp, Diane L; Lehman, Amy; Lemeshow, Stanley (2010) Techniques for handling missing data in secondary analyses of large surveys. Acad Pediatr 10:205-10 |
