This proposal seeks support to collect a second wave of data from a sample of married couples originally interviewed in the Fall and Summer of 1985. It also requests support to administer a clinical diagnostic interview to two groups of respondents: all respondents who meet screening criteria for lifetime diagnoses of Major Depressive Disorder or Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and a random subsample of respondents who do not meet screening criteria. This will allow calculation of both the sensitivity and specificity of the screening instrument. The substantive concern of the research is dyadic adjustment to stress -- the ways in which couples confront stressful experiences and distribute the burdens for stress management between husbands and wives. This focus on dyadic adjustment provides a valuable new perspective to research on sex differences in anxiety and depression. There are two main reasons for requesting support for a second wave. The most important of these is that unbiased and powerful tests of casual hypotheses which cannot be obtained in a cross- sectional survey can be obtained with panel data. The second reason for requesting support is that the new data collection would increase the breadth of the inquiry by adding measures of concepts that could not be included in the previous data collection. The most important of these are measures relevant to the analysis of the differentiation of predictors of episode recurrence from the predictors of episode onset. We can use this differentiation to adjust for the possibility that a history of prior disorder explains the stress-buffering effects of social support, personality characteristics, and coping styles. An explanation of these effects by a latent vulnerability factor representing personal dispositon to clinical disorder has been hypothetized, but not previously tested.
| Kessler, Ronald C (2003) Epidemiology of women and depression. J Affect Disord 74:5-13 |
| Kessler, R C; Molnar, B E; Feurer, I D et al. (2001) Patterns and mental health predictors of domestic violence in the United States: results from the National Comorbidity Survey. Int J Law Psychiatry 24:487-508 |
| Aseltine Jr, R H; Kessler, R C (1993) Marital disruption and depression in a community sample. J Health Soc Behav 34:237-51 |
| Kessler, R C; Magee, W J (1993) Childhood adversities and adult depression: basic patterns of association in a US national survey. Psychol Med 23:679-90 |
| Stone, A A; Kessler, R C; Haythornthwaite, J A (1991) Measuring daily events and experiences: decisions for the researcher. J Pers 59:575-607 |
| Bolger, N; DeLongis, A; Kessler, R C et al. (1989) Effects of daily stress on negative mood. J Pers Soc Psychol 57:808-18 |
