Youth's running away from home as s type of status delinquency, has come to the fore as a serious social issue. Also it is a prevailing issue widely revealing at youth going beyond a level of deviation. Especially, youth runaway is far unstable psycho...
Youth's running away from home as s type of status delinquency, has come to the fore as a serious social issue. Also it is a prevailing issue widely revealing at youth going beyond a level of deviation. Especially, youth runaway is far unstable psychologically, and mentally than general youth, showing a high level of depression. This is a main factor to have a negative effect on youth runaway's life quality, so all of us have to strive over the society and environment such as family, peers and school etc. in order to prevent and reduce depression.
Thus, this study set social support and self-esteem as mediating variables between the two variables in order to prepare for an effective intervention strategy for the depression prevention of youth runway, and add more sophisticated theoretical explanation to relation of youth runaway's experience of parental abuse and depression, and verified if social support and self-esteem mediate depression in youth runaway's experience of parental abuse.
For the purpose of this study, a questionnaire survey was conducted to 295 youths experiencing running away from home of youth runaway and youth counselling welfare center users residing at nationwide youth runaway short-term shelters (except Jeju-do), and technical statistics and structural model were analyzed using PASW(SPSS) 18.0 and Mplus 5.21.
The main contents and results of this study are as follows.
First, it is necessary to have all youth runaway perceive the seriousness of depression. Especially, female youth runaway showed a higher level of depression than male youth runaway, and the more relevant to low-level of academic performance and economic situation the youth runaway, the higher their depression level.
Second, parental abuse had a direct effect on youth runaway's depression, and which influenced depression by mediation of social support, so indicated a partial mediating effect. However, it did not had an effect on depression by mediation of self-esteem. This confirmed that the variable of social support an individual youth runaway distortedly perceives himself or herself when he or she gets many types of help and assistance in relation with others such as peer friends, and teachers etc. is very important, which will be usefully available as a focus of intervention in the field. Also it was found that in a same parental abuse circumstance, youth runaway's depression level can be variant according to social support. Thus it can be a strong preventive plan reducing depression to improve youth runaway's social support according to experiencing parental abuse, furthermore, a strategy to prevent running away from home.
Through the above findings, this study has following significance.
First, the point to prevent and intervene the depression of youth runaway at high-risk condition could be explored by analyzing the route parental abuse influences youth runaway's depression.
Second, unlike the advanced researches explaining direct factors influencing youth runaway's depression, that this study verified the mediating effect of social support as the protective factor of youth runaway's depression is the part not achieved for the meantime, which confirmed the fact that social support mediates the effect to youth runaway's depression. Thus it was confirmed that an intervention to improve social support such as youth runaway's peers, and teachers etc., can be an important preventive strategy.
Third, taking into account that male and female youth runaway, and middle and high school level youth runaway are all exposed to risk related to depression, it is necessary to make a practical approach to prevent or reduce all youth runaway's depression, and highlight the importance of social support as a vital practical strategy to prevent youth's running away from home.