Research Proposal: Depression in Children & Adolescence – A Cause for Concern? Sample

Sadness among kids and adolescents seems to be lifting, but labeling it as depression and prescribing antidepressants is ineffective and possibly harmful (Timimi, 2005). Isn’t it about time we focus on the underlying reasons?

Common misconceptions and responses to hearing that a child is depressed or has depression are, “But what do they have to be depressed about?” Just 40 years ago, many doctors doubted the existence of significant depressive disorders in children, mainly because they believed that children lacked the mature psychological and cognitive structure necessary to experience these problems (aafp.org).

The reason why this matter is worthy of investigation is that it is or possibly will inevitably become a serious societal concern. This is true because aren’t children supposed to be the future? If this matter is left undealt with, what will become of our future? It is very important to start addressing the issues surrounding depression now to teach the next generation how to be resilient against these problems, if possible.

I propose to investigate this matter further by looking at the societal factors surrounding depression in contemporary Britain. I aim to find out how this has happened by examining the ontological aspect of this phenomenon. My goal is to prove that depression in children and adolescents is a major cause for concern in society.

The epistemology of this societal concern is also of great value to the research of this study as I intend to find out why our children and adolescents are depressed. When carrying out research, I found many books on the treatment of depression but a lack of understanding about its significance.

I intend to investigate the sociological aspects related to depression in children and adolescents so that society can begin to understand more about its reality. Western society’s ideas about childhood and child-rearing have changed radically in the past 60 years (Timimi, 2005).

The West’s attitude to child rearing changed from viewing relationships between adults and children primarily in terms of discipline and authority to a focus on tolerance and individual rights. In addition, whereas the model used before the Second World War prepared children for the workplace within a society of scarcity, the post-war model prepared them to become pleasure-seeking consumers (along with their parents) within a growing economy (Jenkins, H, 1998).

Is capitalism the underlying contributing factor, or are there many? I aim to test 5 psychosocial variables associated with current, past, and future depression of children and adolescents in order to establish any correlations. The five I intend on testing are age, gender, family (one or two-parent household), class, current depression, and nutrition.

Literature Review

S. Timimi (2005) identified that increasing numbers of children are being treated for depression, with over 50,000 children being prescribed antidepressants at the end of 2003, and over 170,000 prescriptions per year for antidepressants being issued to people under 18 years old in the United Kingdom (The Guardian, 2003).

These figures are not good and represent the increasing concern that our children are depressed, but why? There are many sociological reasons as to why this may be the problem. They are issues concerned with the changing family forms in modern society, issues of gender, living conditions in the Twentieth Century, media representations and values, and ethics changing to fit in with modernity.

The impact of depressed parents can have an effect on their children. In a study on the relationship between depressed adolescents and depressed mothers (Hammen & Brennan, 2001), it was found that the depressed children of depressed mothers had more negative interpersonal behavior compared to depressed children of non-depressed mothers.

This is reinforced when a study (Chen & Rubin, 1995) shows that the parents of depressed children are less warm and caring and more hostile than parents of non-depressed children. Because of this negative interpersonal relationship between children and their parents, children can develop a negative view of their family.

This negative view can lead to the feeling of lack of control and having a high risk of conflict, rejection, and low self-esteem (Asarnow, Carlson, & Guthrie, 1987). S. Timimi (2005) argues that the changes in the organization of family life are contributing to childhood unhappiness, with the new child-centered permissive culture being a boon to consumer capitalism.

He suggests that there may be a genuine increase in the amount of sadness experienced by children as a result of growing up in a cultural context that has seen immense changes in child-rearing practices, family structures, lifestyles, and education.

Changes in Western economies, working patterns in competitive global markets, and capitalism’s need for never-ending growth mean that more parents feel forced to work for longer hours. State support for children and families has been cut (particularly in the 1980s and 1990s), resulting in widespread child poverty.

With the increase in the number of divorces and two working parents, fathers and mothers are around their children for less of the day, contributing to a generation of ‘home aloners’ – children who have to raise themselves largely.

The problem I feel we are facing stems from ignorance of a fundamental law of human nature, namely that offspring need to learn from their parents. This need arises because, as Wilfred Trotter (1916) so competently showed, man is essentially a herd animal.

For the proper operation of human society, we must be taught to maintain our inherent aptitudes of self-preservation in favor of the needs of society, so the concept of a peaceful permissive human society is nonsensical because a permissive society will destroy itself.

Michael Rutter and David J. Smith argue that there is much evidence to suggest that children and adolescents in the West experience greater mental health problems as a result of sociocultural changes. In the second half of the last century, rates of psychosocial problems such as crime, suicidal behavior, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse increased sharply among children and adolescents in Western societies.

For example, an increase in family decay (from factors such as divorce rates) is associated with increases in youth violence, substance abuse, and suicide. Context-deprived models, such as childhood depression, that conceptualize problems in individualistic terms, hence leading to individualistic interventions (such as pharmacotherapy and cognitive therapy), push more context-rich interventions (such as systemic ones) to the margins.

However, Kedar Nath Dwivedi (1997) claims that the emergence of depressive disorders can be understood in terms of individual emotional development. He argues that emotions are highly specific physiological responses to particular events.

However, by looking at the contributory factors in the generation of depressive disorders, Dwivedi has found a very complex interplay of biological and environmental forces. There is often an intricate interaction between the environmental, biological, and genetic factors in the development of depression among young persons. In a study by Kelvin (1995), even the siblings of depressed children appeared to have three times – that is, 42% – reported prevalence of community samples.

Dweivedi (1997) makes the reader cognizant that depression has also become a major concern for schools because of its impact on acquisition and the hazard of self-destruction. Schools are now acknowledging it as a serious job responsible for lowering the societal and academic operation of kids.

It can be associated with negative equal evaluation, poor self-esteem, poor academic performance, hopelessness about trials and lessons, negative instructor evaluation, behavior upset, social withdrawal, weepiness, school refusal, poor concentration, distractibility, and learning troubles in the school context.

Nolen-Hoeksema and Girgus (1994) suggested that there are a lot of interpersonal relations when it comes to gender, such as the discrimination against gender in an academic setting. This is very prominent in females, where girls can face increased expectations to conform to the standards set forth by society, to pursue feminine type activities and careers.

It appears that parents tend to have “lower expectations” for girls when it comes to school. As a result of those lowered expectations, parents tend to not push their daughters toward a high-profile occupation, instead trying to make their daughter conform to the stereotype of society, like becoming a teacher or a nurse.

In fact, in 1986-1987, women only garnered 15% of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering as compared to 76% and 84% for education and nursing, respectively (Nolen-Hoeksema and Girgus, 1994). Breaking the societal norm can lead to depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991); the more intelligent a girl is, the more likely she is to go down.

This positive correlation could be attributed to the more intelligent girls being able to outperform the boys yet getting punished for doing so. However, in today’s more contemporary society, girls are equally given as much opportunity as boys to succeed.

Nevertheless, studies have shown that girls are more likely to get down than boys due to biological factors and stresses. Being depressed as a female teenager can have long-term effects in terms of social operation, career, and enjoyment of life.

Theoretically, if one were depressed in high school, then their grades would suffer, hence limiting the options that would be available to them after school. The different experiences of each gender can also be the cause of depression in kids and adolescence. The experience can vary by the age of the child or adolescence.

For example, after the age of 15, females are twice as likely to get down compared to men, and in another survey of 11-year-olds, only 2.5% of males met the criteria for major depression while only 0.5% of females met the criteria. However, in a survey of 14-16-year-olds, 13% of females met the criteria, while 3% of boys did not (Nolen-Hoeksema and Girgus, 1994).

This disconnected rise of depressive disorders in females during the mid-to-late adolescence years can be attributed to the more concerns a girl has compared to boys. These concerns and worries can range from their achievements or lack of, body dissatisfaction, sexual abuse, and low self-esteem (Lewinsohn, Gotlib, and Seeley, 1997).

This is reinforced when another survey found that between the ages of 15-18, the prevalence of depression in girls will increase to twice the prevalence of boys (20.69 to 9.58) but will taper off during 18-21 years of age for both genders (15.05 and 6.58) (Hankin, Abramson, Moffitt, Silva, McGee, and Angell, 1998).

David Pilgrim and Anne Rogers (1999) discuss five major sociological positions to outline societal causes of depression. These positions are: societal causation, social reaction (labeling theory), critical theory, social constructivism, and social pragmatism. These five positions incorporate the major contributions of influential contributors such as Durkheim, Weber, Freud, Foucault, and Marx.

Pilgrim (1999) explains that different theoretical positions have been popular and influential at different times. However, he emphasizes the importance of acknowledging that there are no set boundaries to neatly categorize disciplinary trends.

The focus within a societal causation approach is on exploring the relationship between societal disadvantage and mental illness, with the main indicators placed on social class and poverty. The advantage of this psychiatric epidemiological position is that it provides the kind of scientific assurance associated with objectivism and empiricist philosophy, which includes methodological confidence of representativeness and arrows towards causal relationships.

Pilgrim (1999) also emphasizes that there is a greater emphasis on the relationship between societal structure and human agency in gaining insights into the nature of health inequalities. Recent sociological analyses have made use of the concepts of social capital, personal identity, and the located actions and decisions made by individuals when exploring health inequalities.

The lack of social ‘capital’ implies that the quality of social relationships and, most importantly, our perceptions of where we are relative to others in the social structure are likely to be important psycho-social intermediaries in the future cause of depression in children and adolescents.

Data/Information Required

To collect secondary data in order to answer my research question, I have started searching relevant books, journals, articles, and websites to assist me with my findings. However, my main aim is to collect primary data. I recognize that it would not be an easy task to approach a large sample of young people who may find it uncomfortable talking about their personal lives.

It may be difficult to approach numerous young people who will respond in my limited time frame to give me significant results that would be reliable and valid in order to generalize my conclusions.

Therefore, I thought it might be more appropriate to ask my student peers about their experiences with depression and then determine any psychosocial correlations linked with depression. I realize this may affect the validity of my research. However, I have to take into consideration the ethical issues of asking minors for personal information.

Methodology

I intend to utilize a qualitative approach to carry out my research as I feel that the study is a very complex issue to seek and undertake with quantitative research. Quantitative research was considered both impractical and inappropriate.

Quantitative research allows for the construction of ‘big picture’ statements such as ‘depression in kids and adolescence is just a part of growing up’, but these sorts of statements are ‘data compressors’, taking large, intellectually diverse populations and compressing their views into a statistic.

Qualitative research, on the other hand, is a form of ‘data enhancement’: it seeks to explain what views are held and why, allowing biases to be corrected and new, more complex representations of the subject to emerge.

With the use of qualitative strategies, I intend to take a social ‘constructivism’ approach because a key assumption to this broad approach is that reality is not axiomatic, stable and waiting to be discovered, but instead, it is a product of human activity.

In this broad sense, all versions of social constructivism can be identified as a reaction against positivism and naive pragmatism. (Pilgrim, D (2001). My main aim is to find causal relationships between the variables I have chosen to follow the relationship between social disadvantages and depression in kids and adolescents.

The methodological and research techniques I will use to collect primary research for this survey will consist of the survey approach where I will conduct questionnaires. I intend to use a graded random sampling method where I will ask 20 students (10 girls and 10 boys) from 5 different modules of Leeds Metropolitan University to fill out a self-completion questionnaire.

I have chosen to use this method because I feel it will be relevant to a wide range of attitudinal characteristics that are relevant to the study of depression. A self-completion questionnaire will be handed out with a set of devised questions to be answered in their own time. I feel this is a better option than structured interviews as it eliminates any personal embarrassment, the candidate protects their identity, but mainly it eliminates any bias that may be evident from me (the interviewer).

I may find when the questionnaires have been completed that nobody has had any experience of depression in their childhood and adolescence; therefore, I would have to reconsider my approach to the whole survey.

If I had a longer time, I feel the best results I could achieve would be from a longitudinal survey because prospective longitudinal data is valuable because the time relationship between variables will usually enable the direction of the causal influence. (Rutler. M Smith, D (1995).

I understand that I will encounter some problems while conducting my fieldwork as the respondents will surely not be representative of all young British children and adolescents. Nevertheless, it may give me an idea.

Once information is collected, I will be able to analyze it using an inductive analytical approach by processing the aggregation of information I have collected until no instances that are inconsistent with a conjectural account (aberrant or negative instances) of this phenomenon are found (Bryman, 2001).

By utilizing “coding” of my data, I will sharpen my understanding of the information collected, so hopefully, I will be able to see correlations between, for example, gender (Female = 1, Male = 2) against “current depression” (Past = A, Present = B) and see if I can identify any trends. In order to gain access to the information I am looking for, I will have to obtain informed consent from each participant and should not take part in covert research or attempt to mislead them in any way.

I would have to clearly define what my research involves so as not to harm anyone when the information is released; this is essential considering the Data Protection Act (1998) (Bryman, 2001). The consequences of not respecting a person’s anonymity, privacy, and confidentiality are dangerous, so I must be prepared to anticipate and deal with ethical issues. Although some issues are apparent before I begin to collect my data, I must be wary of others arising as I proceed.

My study should not be a lengthy or costly review, and I would be in a position to provide a thorough and comprehensive review in the future. If I find that my results do not show a significant relationship, then this could later lead me to test other variables such as the level of education, religious background, and any other variables that might indicate a “non”-rational frame of mind to see whether they have an overall cause for the evidence behind depression in children and adolescents.

Bibliography

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