Using gender as a focus, this study examined the relative influence of variables concerning parents, friends, and the people themselves when it came to affecting teenage depression. With teenage depression radically increasing in Korean society, this ...
Using gender as a focus, this study examined the relative influence of variables concerning parents, friends, and the people themselves when it came to affecting teenage depression. With teenage depression radically increasing in Korean society, this study was carried out in order to provide academic support for setting up a wide range of diverse policies to mitigate teenage depression, while also establishing measures to prevent/cure depression by looking into the degree that parents, friends, and the subject himself plays in affecting teenage depression based on gender.
For this study, I used data gathered in 2004 concerning grade nine students at middle schools from the Korea Youth Panel Survey (KYPS), which also included data gathered from the same students when they were in grade eight a year prior. The data group consisted of 3,449 students, all of whom who were selected from grade nine students in middle schools across the country in 2004. To ensure reliability concerning the KYPS 2004 data used for this study, another reliability test was carried out using the SPSS 15.0 program, which analyzed the general characteristics of the subjects in the test, including a frequency analysis and a test to check whether their research tools were reliable or not. Also, to analyze the relative influential strength of those variables related to the person?s parents, friends, and him or herself on their depression, t-Test, the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, as well as a Multiple Linear Regression Analysis were carried out with both male and female students.
The results of the study can be summarized as follows:
First, in examining the influence of each variable on every male middle school student?s level of depression, the more parental violence and the lower parental attachment the person experienced, the more depression the student felt, even though the parental observation variable did not reflect any meaningful influence on the result. Regarding the impact of one?s friends, the study showed that the less attachment a student had to a close friend, the more depression they felt, yet when it came to the student himself, the more the student?s sense of emotional control was and the lower the self-trust they had, the more depression they felt. With respect to the relative influence of each variable, the variables showed a meaningful influence in the order of what was connected to the following words, which means the sense of emotional control was most influential in terms of emotional control, attachment to close friends, parental violence, parental attachment, and self-trust.
Second, in examining the influence of each variable on every female middle school student?s level of depression, the more parental violence and the less parentalobservation they experienced, the more depression the students felt. Also, the less attached to close friends they felt, the more depression the students felt. Regarding the student herself, the more a student?s sense of emotional control and the lower the self-trust they had, the more depression they felt. Regarding the relative strength of influence by those variables, both the sense of emotional control and the self-trust had an equally strong influence, followed by parental violence and parental observation.
The following provides information on how to prevent teenage depression, while also suggesting proper methods to deal with it.
First, parental violence and parental attachment have had a meaningful influence on the depression level of male students, while parental violence and observation have had a meaningful influence on female students? level of depression. Thus, we should consider the prevention and cure of depression through the improvement of relationships between parents and teenagers by coming up with ways to improve family relationships and strengthen parent-child relationships.
Second, although the attachment to close friends was not a meaningful variable for female students, male students were most influenced by their attachment to good friends. As a result, male students need programs to improve and strengthen relationships among friends of the same age group.
Third, self-trust and a sense of emotional control?both variables related to the students themselves?had a meaningful influence on male and female students, which is why they need programs to improve self-trust and the ability to actively control their emotions.