Rates of Symptoms of Depression in a National Sample

This paper is an analysis of data on symptoms of depression in a nationwide sample of adults, collected during the National Center for Health Statistics' first Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The data are analyzed by a statistical adjustment procedure which assesses the impact of the major sociodemographic variables simultaneously, instead of one by one, which avoids a former major source of confusion. The measure of depression is the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale. With the exception of race, the study replicates earlier findings. The adjustment procedure facilitates generalization of the results to other populations which are not demographically comparable, such as to smaller locales in the United States, or to populations defined by some criterion variable. Comparison of results is made with earlier work that used the identical measure of depression in two separate locales.