BOSTON – Adolescent girls who exhibit symptoms of depression are at greater risk for subsequent intimate partner violence than their nondepressed peers, a study has shown.
The findings suggest that preventing, identifying, and treating depression in this population, as well as preemptive counseling of high-risk adolescent girls about their peer choices and romantic relationships, “could reduce the likelihood of subsequent victimization,” lead author Jocelyn A. Lehrer, Sc.D., said at the annual meeting of the Society for Adolescent Medicine.
Dr. Lehrer of the University of California, San Francisco and her colleagues from the Harvard School of Public Health and Children's Hospital in Boston reviewed home interview data from a sample of 1,659 young women ages 15–24 who participated in Waves II and III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They examined the incidence and prevalence of past-week depressive symptoms measured in the Wave II data using a 19-item modified Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale (CES-D).
The investigators correlated the baseline depression information with data regarding past-year physical partner abuse from the Wave III surveys conducted about 5 years later, controlling for age, race, ethnicity, parental education, retrospective childhood and physical sexual abuse, and baseline dating violence and forced sex.
Depression symptoms were measured as both dichotomous and continuous variables, and exposure to partner violence was classified as mild (threats of violence, pushing, and/or shoving) or moderate to severe (hitting, slapping, kicking, or an injury causing action), Dr. Lehrer noted.
All of the girls in the study were in a current, opposite-sex relationship at follow-up at the time of the Wave III interview. The average age of the participants was 15.9 years at baseline and 21.3 years at follow-up.
Baseline depression measures showed that 10.2% of the young women in the sample had high levels of depressive symptoms. “In adjusted models [using the dichotomous depressive symptoms variable], high baseline symptoms were associated with 1.86 times the odds of subsequent exposure to moderate to severe partner violence,” Dr. Lehrer said. With use of the continuous depressive symptoms variable, “each standard deviation increase in baseline symptom level increased the odds of exposure to both mild partner violence and moderate to severe partner violence by 24%,” she said.
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health explores the causes of health-related behaviors of adolescents in grades 7–12 and their outcomes in young adulthood. The Wave I survey was completed in 1994. Waves II and III were completed in 1996 and 2002, respectively.