Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESEpidemiology of Depressive Symptoms in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health
Section snippets
Study Population
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth) is a survey of adolescents in grades 7 through 12 (Bearman et al., 1997). The study population includes a representative sample of all public and private high schools in the United States systematically and randomly identified to represent regional, racial, and urban strata. Of 27,000 adolescents invited to participate in the in-home survey, 76.8% completed the interview. The interview was conducted in the students’ homes during
RESULTS
The AddHealth study represents a diverse sampling of the population of adolescents in the United States. Characteristics of the sample at baseline are shown in Table 1.
DISCUSSION
Depressive symptoms in adolescents are common, yet very complex. Our results show that many adolescents experience depressive symptoms: almost 30% of adolescents in the AddHealth survey reported depressive symptoms (using CES-D ≥ 16), and nearly 10% reported moderate to severe depressive symptoms (using CES-D ≥ 24). Mean CES-D scores of 12.2 for the overall AddHealth population were lower than scores reported in other studies (range from 13.6 to 18.9) (Culp et al., 1995;Garrison et al., 1989,
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This work was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program.