Dimensions of Social Adjustment in Depressed Women

There have been relatively few empirical investigations of the dimensions underlying rating of social and interpersonal functioning. Most social adjustment scales have evaluated functioning in terms of role areas such as work adjustment, marital adjustment, social and leisure adjustment. These ignore the possibility of consistent patterns of abnormality across roles. In this investigation a semistructural interview scale measuring social adjustment was administered to 40 female depressed patients and 40 normal women from the general population. Ratings were made on 48 items covering detailed aspects of social functioning. Internal consistencies of two alternative theoretical systems of grouping items were first explored by examining correlations of items with total scores for the group of items. The first system grouped items into six role areas of work, social and leisure, extended family, marital as spouse, parental,and family unit. The second system grouped items, irrespective of role,into five qualitative categories: satisfactions and feelings, global judgments,and ratings of actual behavior, further divided into performance,interpersonal relations, and friction. Both theoretical systems, and particularly that by role area, were found to include items that were heterogeneous in terms of shared variance. A factor analysis with varimax rotation was then performed. The social functioning of these subjects was adequately described by six orthogonal factors. These were easily interpretable and corresponded to work performance, interpersonal friction, inhibited communication,submissive dependency, family attachment and anxious rumination. Patients were significantly distinguished from normal controls by scores on all six factors, which appeared to summarize a diverse range of social maladjustments of depressed patients. These factors cut across role areas such as marital, or work, indicating important systematic elements which may be ignored if social functioning is evaluated solely in terms of such areas. The factor dimensions provide an alternative conceptual framework for describing the social maladjustment of depressed patients which may be more suitable for observing patterns of change and measuring the effects of psychotherapyor other treatments.