Item Detail
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11843
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4
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0
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English
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Depression in Mormon Women
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University of Utah
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Ph.D. diss.
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"Mormon women (members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) are actively encouraged by their religious leaders to be full-time homemakers. Because of this strong emphasis on living a traditional female role, Mormon women are thought by many to be at a greater risk for depression than other women. This cross-sectional study compared 143 white, married Mormon mothers with children 14 years old and younger to 36 white, married non-Mormon mothers with children of the same age. Random-digit dialing was used to select a sample from the Salt Lake metropolitan area. A telephone interview was used to collect the data. Depressive symptoms were measured using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Among those sampled, 23.8% of the Mormons and 22.2% of the non-Mormons were experiencing at least mild levels of depressive symptoms. Mormon and non-Mormon women had mean depression scores of 6.90 and 7.05, respectively. Crude risk ratios were calculated and adjusted risk ratios were used to control for confounding variables (education, caring from spouse, health status, and income). It was found that Mormon and non-Mormon women were at the same risk for having depressive symptoms both before and after adjusting for confounding. Adjusted risk ratios suggest the following are positive and significant risk factors for depressive symptoms in Mormon women: not having a college degree, little caring from one's spouse, a perception of being in less than good health, and having an income below $16,000. The following variables were found to not be associated with depressive symptoms in Mormon women: employment status, church attendance, temple attendance, prayer, marriage outside the faith, religious motivation, number of children, age, work satisfaction, and stressful life events. However, the results are not conclusive because of problems associated with: (1) not being able to control for a possible socially desirable response set bias, (2) generalizability beyond the study population, (3) obtaining a non-Mormon sample, (4) cross-sectional designs, and (5) other potential sources of bias related to the non-Mormon control group. Yet, taken together, the findings suggest the possibility that experiencing depressive symptoms is not a particular problem related to being a Mormon woman and that perhaps the Mormon woman's traditional role is not associated with such symptoms." [Author's abstract]