For the purpose of unraveling whether early loss influences the later depression, 500 housewives in the Seoul area were sampled by the multi-stage probabilistic stratified sampling.
The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Life Event Stress Rating Scale of Housewives (LERS) constructed by Yoo et al. (1994) were administered to all the subjects. Early loss was defined as the loss before 15 years of the subjects age.
The early loss, as a whole or as in sperate age groups, proved to have no influence on the BDI score. In the younger groups under the 50 years of age, the early loss according to each area of recent life event stress did not affect BDI score.
But,
only
in the elderly group over the age 50, the experience of recent life event stress was proved to have influence on the BDI score in the early loss group. The early loss group. compared to the loss-free group, was lower in the BDI score when they
had
no
experience of stress factors "the economy and job" and "the change of life circumstance", but equivalent when they had experience of the above stresses. The early loss group was lower in the BDI score when they had no experience of stress factor
"separation", but higher in the BDI score when they had experience of stress of recent separation.
The above findings suggest that the early loss group, with no experience of recent stresses, is less depressed in the loss-free group and the recent life event such as "the separation" possibly provokes depression in the early loss group.
|