This training proposal is designed to enable me to undertake independent applied research focusing on maternal depression, specifically environmental risk factors and their mediators. It will provide a specific set of skills and knowledge of mental health issues and enable me to build on research that has demonstrated that poor and minority women have almost twice the rates of maternal depression compared to their middleclass counterparts. The effect of the social context on maternal depression, and postpartum depression in particular, has not been thoroughly studied in disadvantaged women. This is significant because many risk factors for depression are not wholly endogenous but arise out of the dynamic interaction between the individual and the social and physical environment. Furthermore, approaches to prevention of maternal depression, and postpartum depression specifically, differ based on whether the focus is the individual or the environment. The career development plan proposed herein consists of didactic training and mentored research projects. In the research projects, the main question concerns the role of the social environment, represented by neighborhood characteristics. Researching social environmental factors brings the complex interplay between race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and area of residence into focus. In recognition of these complexities, we will recruit non-Hispanic African American mothers in order to identify variation in neighborhood factors in a group of women generally considered at high risk. Study I is a qualitative study of mothers sampled based on a neighborhood (census block group) sampling frame. The objective of this study is to assess mothers' perceptions about the influence of neighborhood stressors on their mood states using qualitative analytic methods (specifically, focus groups and structured interviews). Study 2 is a cross-sectional study of mothers also from low- and mid-level SES neighborhoods. The objective of this study is to determine if neighborhood characteristics are associated with the presence of depressive symptoms, while adjusting for important individual characteristics with the use of structural equation modeling.
| Mitchell, Stephanie J; Ronzio, Cynthia R (2011) Violence and other stressful life events as triggers of depression and anxiety: what psychosocial resources protect African American mothers? Matern Child Health J 15:1272-81 |
| Ronzio, Cynthia R; Mitchell, Stephanie J (2010) The highs and lows of maternal depression: cluster analysis of depression symptoms in a sample of African American women. J Investig Med 58:887-92 |
