A study on the relationship between students’ psychological depression and family situations using multi-factor logistic regression analysis

Abstract

Long-term psychological depression can seriously damage the physical and mental growth of adolescent students, and effective interventions are needed to address students’ depression. This paper briefly introduced students’ depressive mood and surveyed students in three grades from ten high schools in Zhengzhou City in 2020 with questionnaires that included the degree of depression and family environment in addition to conventional information. After preliminary screening of indicators related to depressive mood, the influence of family environment on depressive mood was analyzed using multiple regression analysis. The results showed that factors such as intimacy, recreation, and organization in the family environment could effectively suppress depressive mood, while ambivalent and controlling factors could exacerbate depressive mood.

Keywords

Depressed mood family environment multiple regression analysis influence

1. Introduction

Rapid economic development has greatly improved people’s quality of life, and it is easier to satisfy material needs than in the past; however, at the same time, the accelerated pace of life has also increased people’s mental stress [1]. Although the satisfaction of material needs can relieve some of the mental stress, the satisfaction of material needs cannot replace the satisfaction of spiritual needs. Under the long-term accumulated mental stress, mental health problems will also appear. For adults, because they have enough experience, they can regulate their mental state to a certain extent [2]; however, for students in a period of physical and mental growth, mental health problems are crucial. Adolescent students are growing rapidly physically and mentally and are more likely to experience psychological and emotional problems under the influence of academic and family factors. Due to their limited experience, adolescent students are often unable to regulate their psychological emotions, which eventually leads to poor mental health [3]. Sampson et al. [4] deeply studied the predictive factors of elevated postpartum depression (PPD) symptoms among mothers identified as being at high risk for child maltreatment in a home visiting program. They found that elevated PPD symptoms might have long-term effects on the home environment, including negative effects on the maternal acceptance and involvement with the child. Baek et al. [5] used general strain theory to examine the mediating effects of negative stimuli (poor family relationships, child maltreatment, and poor parenting) and negative emotions (depression) on running away from home. They found that eliminating negative stimuli in the home environment was important in reducing depression and running away. Choi et al. [6] examined how neighborhood structural and social characteristics in early childhood affect later depressive symptoms in adolescence. Their findings indicated that neighborhood structural disadvantage and collective efficacy directly influenced children’s adverse experiences, bullying behaviors, and social-emotional development. This paper briefly introduced student depression and surveyed students in three grades from ten high schools in Zhengzhou City in 2020 with a questionnaire that included depression level and family environment in addition to conventional information. After preliminary screening of depression-related indicators, the influence of family environment on depression was analyzed by multiple regression analysis. The contribution of this paper is to collect the family status of high school students and their psychological depression through a questionnaire and use logistic regression analysis to analyze the main family factors that influence students’ depression, thus providing a reference direction for alleviating students’ depression.

2. Psychological depressive emotion and family situation

Adolescence is a period of rapid physical and mental growth, but it is also a time of increased internalizing and externalizing problems. For example, psychological depression is a common internalizing problem [7]. Psychological depression is a negative mental state that manifests as uncontrollable sadness, unexplained anxiety, sleep disturbances, and even suicidal thoughts. Depression is a relatively mild form of psychological depression, and people with depression feel sad about their environment [8]. Generally, the depressed feeling will be resolved after emotional guidance and relationship, but it will get worse and eventually develop into depressive disorder if the depressed feeling lasts long under the influence of external factors [9].

Depressive emotions are one of the types of depression that have little effect on students but can develop into be more severe depression if not alleviated by timely intervention [10]. Therefore, in order to detect students’ depressive emotions and make targeted interventions, the influencing factors need to be studied. The external environmental factors that can affect depressive emotions include social environment, campus environment, and family environment [11]. For students who are still in adolescence, they have little exposure to the social environment, so they are greatly influenced by campus environmental factors and family environmental factors, and among these two environmental factors, students do not spend as much time at home as they do at school [12]. For adolescent students, the family is the main place of life and growth, the earliest social environment that individuals are exposed to, and the direct environment to which they are most exposed, and interpersonal interactions and emotional exchanges in the family can impact the psychological growth of adolescent students [13]. Therefore, this paper focuses on the relationship between family situation and students’ psychological depressive emotion and provides an effective reference for effective intervention in students’ mental health problems.

3. Example analysis

3.1 Research subjects

Ten high schools in Zhengzhou City in 2020 were selected as subjects. Questionnaires were distributed to senior one, two, and three students in these schools. Finally, 2985 valid questionnaires were collected.

3.2 Questionnaire content

Since the actual questionnaire contains many questions about students’ depression and family environment, and space is limited, only the basic outline structure of the questionnaire is given in Table 1. The questionnaire had three parts. The first part was the general survey information, as shown in Table 1. This part of the information was general and was used to check for commonalities among the students surveyed. Then, the students’ depression level was investigated. The self-rating depression scale (SDS) [14] was used to measure the level of depression. There were 20 questions in the SDS, ten of which were positive-scoring questions and ten were negative-scoring questions. Each question had four options, and the degree of the options became higher in order. The scores were one, two, three, and four for the options in the positive-scoring question and four, three, two, and one for the options in the negative-scoring question. The final evaluation result of depression severity was obtained by dividing the sum of the scores for all items by 80, and the result was considered not to be depression if it was less than 0.5. The third part of the questionnaire was the investigation of the family environment, and the family environment scale (FES) [15] was used to evaluate the family environment. There were ten subscales in the FES, indicating ten perspectives of evaluation. Each subscale had nine questions, each with the options “yes” (one point) and “no” (zero point).

Table 1
Basic structure of the questionnaire on depressive emotion and family environment

Survey item		Survey result
General survey information	Gender
	Age
	Grade
	Academic performance
	Monthly household income
	Parental work status
	Parental education level
	Having only one child?
Depression evaluation	Self-rating depression scale
Family environment evaluation	Family environment scale

3.3 Reliability test

Cronbach’s alpha [16] was used to test the reliability of the questionnaire data. The higher the coefficient, the higher the credibility of the data. The Cronbach’s alpha $>$ 0.7 indicated that the questionnaire data were credible. The calculation formula of the Cronbach’s alpha is:

$\displaystyle\alpha=\frac{nr}{(n-1)r+1},$ (1)

where $n$ refers to the number of questions in the scale and $r$ is the average correlation coefficient between the questions in the scale. The questionnaire scale in this paper was composed of general survey data, depression evaluation, and family environment evaluation. The evaluation scale of the family environment was composed of ten subscales. Table 2 shows the Cronbach’s alpha of the variables in the questionnaire. It was seen from Table 2 that the variables in the questionnaire generally had good measurement reliability, so they could be used in the subsequent multiple regression analysis [17]. The variable items in Table 2were the question items in the questionnaire. The question variables in the generaly information section of the questionnaire were used to check for commonality among students. The depression variable and the family environment variable were taken from the SDS and the FES. Multiple regression analysis is a statistical analysis method that considers one of the variables as the dependent variable and the rest as the independent variables, then establishes a linear or nonlinear mathematical model relationship between the independent and dependent variables, and analyzes it through sample data. Here, the level of depression was the dependent variable, and the rest of the variables in the questionnaire were considered as independent variables.

Table 2

Reliability test of variables in the questionnaire

Variable	Cronbach’s alpha	Variable	Cronbach’s alpha
Gender	0.879	Intimacy	0.878
Age		Independence	0.711
Grade		Ambivalence	0.897
Academic performance		Emotional expression	0.699
Monthly household income		Culture	0.704
Father’s work status		Success	0.698
Mother’s work status		Entertainment	0.886
Father’s education level		Organization	0.876
Mother’s education level		Control	0.867
Having only one child?		Moral and religious views	0.712
Depression level	0.876

SPSS software was used to statistically analyze the data from the questionnaire. Multiple regression analysis was performed on the variables in the questionnaire.

3.4 Analysis results

Twenty-one indicators related to psychological depressive emotion were obtained through the questionnaire. The depression level directly indicates the depressive emotion of the students. The students were divided into depression and non-depression groups according to the depression level. Before analyzing the relationship between the remaining 20 indicators and depressive emotion, the 20 indicators were compared between the depression and non-depression groups. Based on the differences, the indicators with little influence on depressive emotion were first excluded to reduce the computation of the regression analysis afterwards.

Table 3 shows the results of the comparison of survey indicators between the depressed and non-depressed groups. The table shows that there are significant differences between the two groups in seven indicators such as academic achievement, being an only child or not, closeness, ambivalence, recreation, organization, and control, indicating that the above seven indicators are correlated with students’ depressive emotions. In the remaining indicators, there was no significant difference between the depressed and non-depressed groups, indicating that these indicators have little effect on students’ depressed mood.

Table 3
Comparison of survey indicators between the depressed and non-depressed groups among students

Variable	Depression group (886 people)	Non-depression group (2,099 people)	$P$ -value for the difference
Gender (male : female)	55.4 : 44.6	54.6 : 45.4	0.823
Age/years	16.25 $\pm$ 1.11	16.62 $\pm$ 1.21	0.254
Year (senior one : senior two : senior three)/%	32.4 : 33.1 : 34.5	33.2 : 31.3 : 35.5	0.425
Academic performance (excellent : pass : poor)/%	14.8 : 36.7 : 48.5	37.8 : 42.1 : 20.1	0.001
Monthly household income (high : medium : low)/%	10.8 : 48.6 : 40.6	11.3 : 40.2 : 48.8	0.547
Father’s work status (local : foreign)/%	40.3 : 59.7	45.6 : 54.4	0.112
Mother’s work status (local : field)/%	44.3 : 55.7	43.2 : 56.8	0.121
Father’s education level (high school : associate degree : bachelor’s	28.9 : 38.6 : 32.5	27.4 : 39.7 : 32.9	0.874
degree)/%
Mother’s education level (high school : associate : bachelor’s degree)/%	29.7 : 34.6 : 35.7	30.1 : 35.4 : 34.5	0.742
Having only one child (yes : no)/%	79.4 : 20.6	21.3 : 78.7	0.001
Intimacy/point	6.33 $\pm$ 1.21	7.86 $\pm$ 1.13	0.000
Independence/point	5.67 $\pm$ 1.24	5.55 $\pm$ 1.12	0.097
Ambivalence/point	3.33 $\pm$ 1.02	3.12 $\pm$ 1.01	0.000
Emotional expression/point	5.56 $\pm$ 1.36	5.61 $\pm$ 1.25	0.101
Culture/point	5.31 $\pm$ 1.11	5.21 $\pm$ 1.03	0.103
Success/point	6.36 $\pm$ 1.04	6.45 $\pm$ 1.02	0.213
Entertainment/point	3.89 $\pm$ 1.11	4.87 $\pm$ 1.32	0.001
Organization/point	6.01 $\pm$ 1.25	6.89 $\pm$ 1.12	0.000
Control/point	4.89 $\pm$ 1.01	3.11 $\pm$ 1.25	0.000
Moral and religious views/point	5.36 $\pm$ 1.41	5.31 $\pm$ 1.11	0.257

By comparing the surveyed indicators between the depression and non-depression groups, the indicators that had a significant correlation with depressive emotion were screened according to the significance of the difference. Then, to further analyze the relationship between the seven indicators on depressive emotion, multiple regression analysis was used, and the results are shown in Table 4. The $F$ value obtained after the regression analysis result in Table 4 was 21.332, and the $P$ value of the $F$ value was less than 0.001, indicating a statistical significance. The adjusted $R^{2}$ indicated that the regression analysis result could explain the relationship between 87.4% of the indicators and depressive emotion. Among the specific seven indicators, the $P$ values of the correlation coefficients of “academic performance” and “having only one child” were both greater than 0.05, and the $P$ values of the correlation coefficients of the other five indicators were not greater than 0.001. Intimacy in the family environment was negatively associated with depressive emotion; ambivalence was positively associated with depressive emotion; entertainment was negatively associated with depressive emotion; organization was negatively correlated with depressive emotion; control was positively correlated with depressive emotion.

Table 4

Results of multiple regression analysis of the relationship between students’ depressive emotion and family environment

Variable affecting depressive emotion	Correlation coefficient $B$	Adjusted correlation coefficient $\beta$	$t$ value	$P$ value	$F$ value	Adjusted $R^{2}$
Academic performance	0.312	0.235	0.125	0.214	21.332 ${}^{*}$	0.874
Having only one child	0.421	0.316	0.325	0.123
Intimacy	$-$ 0.125	$-$ 0.215	1.243	0.001
Ambivalence	0.269	0.213	1.356	0.000
Entertainment	$-$ 0.187	$-$ 0.175	1.241	0.001
Organization	$-$ 0.131	$-$ 0.096	1.365	0.001
Control	0.314	0.256	1.452	0.000

4. Discussion

Depression, as a negative emotion, can make people feel anxious and negative about future life. Being in a depressive emotion for a long time can cause serious harm to a person’s physical and mental health, especially for students in their adolescence. Students are undergoing rapid physical and mental development during adolescence, which is a critical period for building a healthy personality. Once they fall into a depressive emotion for a long time, it will cause great damage to their physical and mental growth if intervention is not made in time. Therefore, in order to intervene in students’ depression in time, the factors affecting students’ depressive emotions were analyzed. Regarding the factors influencing student depression, relevant studies on international students are as follows. Gold et al. [18] studied medical students from three countries (USA, China, and Middle Eastern countries) and used the patient health questionnaire-2 (PHQ-2) and the modified maslach burnout inventory to assess depression and burnout in medical students from three cohorts ( $n=$ 473). The final results showed that medical students from the Middle East had the highest rate of depression, followed by China, and the United States had the lowest rate. Silva et al. [19] used the state-trait anxiety inventory and the maslach burnout inventory to survey medical students at the Medical School of the University of Minho, Portugal, between the academic years 2009–2010 and 2012–2013. The final results showed that personal factors (anxiety traits, substance choice factors, relationship patterns and academic burnout) were consistently associated with high levels of depression during medical training. Wimsatt et al. [20] surveyed students at a large, Midwestern medical school. In their survey, most students reported that if they were depressed, they would be embarrassed if their classmates knew about it.

This paper analyzed the factors that influence depressive emotions from the perspective of the family environment. The family environment was chosen because the family is the most direct environment they come into contact with, and the words and actions of family members and family conditions will have a direct impact on adolescent students. In this paper, questionnaires were distributed to senior one, two, and three students from ten high schools in Zhengzhou City in 2020, and their general information, family status, and depression level were investigated. The students were divided into depression and non-depression groups according to their depression level. The remaining survey items were compared between the two groups to preliminarily obtain index items related to depressive emotions. The initially screened items were further analyzed using multiple regression analysis, and the final results are described above.

The analysis results suggested that intimacy in the family environment was negatively correlated with depressive emotions because intimacy reflects the degree of mutual trust and support among family members in the family environment. The higher the intimacy, the more trust the students have in their familities, the more support they can get from their families, and the less depressive emotions they have. Ambivalence was positively correlated with depressive emotions because ambivalence reflects the degree of conflict of ideas among family members. The greater the ambivalence, the greater the likelihood of conflict among family members, the less support the student can access, and the more severe the depressive emotion. Entertainment and organization in the family environment were also negatively related to depressive emotion, because entertainment and organization can create a positive atmosphere for the family, in which students can relax more and express their worries. Control in the family environment was positively related to depressive emotion, because it reflects the degree of control the family has over the student. The higher the degree of control, the more rigid the family atmosphere, and the more the student’s freedom at home is restricted, which is not conducive to expressing inner worries.

Based on the results of the analysis, here are some simple recommendations that will facilitate the intervention of depressive emotions in students.

1.
Patents can organize regular family activities to improve family intimacy and build excellent parent-child relationships.
2.
Guardians can communicate with their children frequently or regularly, and the content of the conversation can be casual to encourage children to take the initiative to talk about their concerns.
3.
Patents must take the problems raised by their children seriously, not superficially, and not to do everything in the process of solving the problems, but to guide them from the side as much as possible.
4.
Guardians should not make arbitrary judgments about their children’s explanations, and they should respect their wishes and not give orders in a rude manner.

5. Conclusion

Students’ depressive emotion was briefly introduced in this paper. A questionnaire survey was performed on students in three grades of ten high schools in Zhengzhou City in 2020 to survey their depression level and family environment in addition to conventional information. After preliminary screening of depression-related indicators, the influence of family environment on depressive emotion was analyzed by multiple regression analysis. The results are as follows. (1) Seven indicators, including academic performance, having only one child, intimacy, ambivalence, entertainment, organization, and control, were correlated with depressive emotion. (2) Intimacy, entertainment, and organization of the family environment had significant inhibitory effects on depressive emotion, and ambivalence and control could significantly exacerbate depressive emotion. (3) Several suggestions were made to improve family intimacy, entertainment, and organization and to reduce ambivalence and control.

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