Brief reportDepression in Asian–American and Caucasian undergraduate students
Section snippets
Participants
A total of 2427 people viewed the consent form and/or began the questionnaire. Those who did not consent, indicated more than one (sub)ethnicity, or did not respond to the gender and ethnicity items were excluded. The remaining sample (N = 1837) consisted of 1251 Asian–American (869F, 382M) and 586 Caucasian (410F, 176M) undergraduate students (M = 20.32, SD = 1.93 years) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The Asian–American group was further subdivided into groups of Chinese (N = 605),
Results
Fig. 1 illustrates the raw PHQ-9 score for each ethnicity and gender. Raw PHQ-9 scores were normalized through a square root transformation. A two-factor (2 ethnicity × 2 gender) ANOVA indicated significantly greater depression severity amongst Asian–Americans as compared to Caucasians, F(1, 1764) = 10.340, p = 0.001, and significantly more severe depression in females as compared to males, F(1, 1764) = 11.013, p = 0.001. There was no significant interaction between ethnicity and gender on depression
Discussion
The hypothesis regarding ethnic differences in depression was not supported while the hypothesis regarding gender differences was confirmed. Overall, Asian–Americans experienced more grave depression than Caucasians. In addition, Korean–Americans were significantly more depressed than Chinese–Americans, other Asian–Americans and Caucasians. As hypothesized, female students exhibited greater depression severity than their male counterparts.
Role of funding source
Funding for this study was provided by the John A. Majda, MD Memorial Fund. The Foundation had no further role in study design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.
Conflict of interest
The authors do not have any interests that may be interpreted as influencing the research.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Shahrokh Golshan, PhD for his statistical advice and guidance. The authors would also like to acknowledge support from the UCSD Foundation and the John A. Majda, MD Memorial Fund.
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