SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS AS PREDICTORS OF DEPRESSION IN WOMEN
Keywords:
depression, socio-economic status, womenAbstract
It is known that difficult living conditions can have an impact on the prevalence of mental illnesses in
people. In addition to biological factors, one of the main generators and causes of depression is considered to be
poor socio-economic conditions. Women are particularly affected by this health problem, due to their role and social
expectations, and socio-economic factors are also often cited as the cause of this psychological condition in women.
Objective: To determine whether the occurrence of depressive disorder symptoms in women is related to socioeconomic
factors.
Methods: The design of the research was a cross-sectional study based on the assessment of depressive symptoms in
women, analyzing the influence of socio-economic factors on the occurrence of depressive symptoms. The total
number of respondents was N=200. Subjects previously diagnosed with depression or some other mental illness
were not included in the research. To collect the necessary data on the socio-economic factors of the respondents, a
questionnaire was used that was specially constructed for that purpose, and to assess the symptoms of depression,
we used the Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL-25), more precisely the second subscale of this questionnaire,
which contains questions related to symptoms of depression. Each respondent filled out the questionnaire on the
basis of voluntary consent, and strict discretion was taken into account and anonymity was guaranteed for the
respondents who agreed to participate in the research. The statistical program IBM SPSS Statistics 27. was used for
data processing, where we used Spearman's correlation coefficient to determine the connection between socioeconomic
factors and symptoms of depression in women.
Results: Through statistical analysis, the socio-economic factor "are you satisfied with your social status" showed
the greatest statistical significance of the connection with depression symptoms. After that, the socio-economic
factor that is related to symptoms of depression is followed by statistical significance "are there any employees in
your family", and the third factor by statistical significance that showed influence and connection with symptoms of
depression is "is the income sufficient for you and your family". The analysis also showed a mutual positive
correlation between socioeconomic factors as well as within depressive symptoms that correlate with each other.
Conclusion: It was found that socio-economic factors have a strong influence on the occurrence of symptoms of
depression in women. This further confirmed earlier research and claims about the influence of socio-economic
factors as a cause of depression in women.
Recommendation: Early recognition of cases of depression and raising socio-economic status can be helpful in
treating depression.
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