Health and Social Welfare Review Vol.35 No.3, pp.42-70
Abstract
Despite the serious negative effect of deepened economic inequality and relative deprivation on individuals’ mental health, most of the previous studies on poverty and mental health have used socioeconomic status as an indicator of poverty. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of socioeconomic deprivation, more comprehensive concept of poverty, on depression, and to analyze the moderating effect of age. For this purpose, we used data of 13,005 individuals aged over 20 from the Korean Welfare Panel 9th Wave (2014). Socioeconomic deprivation was indexed by measuring and adding up 22 items regarding 7 areas of nutrition, housing, education, social security, employment and economic status, social requirements, and health and medical care among the KWP questionnaire items; depression was measured by CESD-11, and age was used as a continuous variable. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to examine the relationship between socioeconomic deprivation and depression, and the moderating effect of age. Analysis results show that, there is a significant positive relationship between socioeconomic deprivation and depressive mood, and a statistically significant moderating effect of age between two variables, that is, the effect of socioeconomic deprivation on depressive mood is increasing as the age increases. Based on these findings, it is suggested that policy and practice intervention should be planned considering the age factor, along with developing comprehensive poverty policies to alleviate socioeconomic deprivation.
