The association of personal,parental,school and community factors with depressive symptoms among a sample of Colombian students of ages 9 to 12 years

Abstract

Few studies have examined how the personal characteristics of students, together with factors from their local social environments and communities, affect students living in generally high levels of social disruption. We examined the influence that personal characteristics as well as factors from the local social environments and communities may have on Colombian students’ levels of depressive symptoms shortly after the end of the of armed conflict. Data were collected from 710 students attending the fifth grade in a random sample of elementary schools in the province of Sucre in Colombia. Information was gathered on the students’ ages and gender as well as characteristics of their parents, school factors, and community factors. A five-level hierarchical regression model was used to determine the extent to which all these variables predicted depression scores, as measured by the Adolescent Depression Rating Scale. While personal, parental, school and community factors were all found to predict depression scores, the category, parental factors had the most impact. That was followed by school factors, community factors and finally personal characteristics. Multiple social and environmental factors were associated with the level of depression experienced by Colombian students.

Plain language summary

Few studies have examined how the characteristics of students, together with their local social environments and communities, affect students living in generally high levels of social disruption. We examined the influence that personal characteristics as well as factors from the local social environments and communities may have on Colombian students’ levels of depressive symptoms shortly after the end of the of armed conflict. Data were collected from 710 students attending the fifth grade in a sample of Colombian, elementary schools. Information was gathered on the students’ ages and gender as well as characteristics of their parents, schools, and communites. We used regression analyses to determine the extent to which all these variables predicted students' levels of depression. While the personal, parental, school and community characteristics of students were all found to predict depression scores, how students were parented had the most impact. That was followed by characteristics of their schools, communities and their personal characteristics. We concluded that multiple social and environmental factors were associated with the level of depression experienced by Colombian students.