Puerto Rican women: sociocultural factors in depression
Embargo Date
Indefinite
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
It has been widely established that depression is one of the most used mental health diagnosis in our time. According to The President's Commission on Mental Health (1978), symptoms of depression occur more frequently in women, nonwhites, the separated, the divorced, the poor and the less educated. The traumatic experience of relocating to another country where the language and culture are different is also a factor that may result in depressive symptomatology.
The Puerto Rican woman who migrates to the United States faces a series of stressful situations resulting from cultural differences, the language barrier, lack of education and employment skills, and discrimination. She often faces these difficulties without the social support network of extended family members which she relied on in Puerto Rico.
This study explored the relationship between depression and social support networks in the lives of 50 Puerto Rican women living in the Boston area. It looked at the participant's level of support satisfaction, perceived availability, and the negative or conflicting aspects of her social support network, and compared the differences in network orientation between depressed and non-depressed Puerto Rican women.
The participants were selected from various community agencies that offered social services to the Latino community in Boston and Cambridge during a six month period. The demographic characteristics of these women as well as the description of their migration patterns and the characteristics of their SSN were described.
Eight measures were used, including the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression (CES-D) Scale, a Background Information Questionnaire, the Latino Bicultural Assessment Questionnaire (LBAQ), a Stress Scale, a Network Orientation Scale, (NOS), a Cultural Beliefs Questionnaire, the Arizona Social Support Interview Scale (ASSIS), and five questions developed by the author to gage ability to ask for help, availability and satisfaction with the help they receive from others. Each interview lasted approximately two hours.
It was proposed that satisfaction, ava~lability of social support and network orientation would inversely correlate with depression, while conflict with SSN would directly correlate with depression. The findings corroborated the direct relationship between conflict, SSN and depression. The other three hypotheses of satisfaction, availability and positive orientation to SSN although not corroborated were in the predicted direction. Study limitations as well as clinical issues regarding treatment of depressed Puerto Rican women and their SSN were discussed.
Description
Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Boston University
License
PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you.