| This study explored whether Latino ethnicity, female gender, number of chronic illnesses, living alone, and widowhood were associated with depression in a convenience sample of elderly low-income primary care patients. It also examined whether Latinos would endorse symptoms of guilt, sad mood and somatic symptoms in comparison to their White counterparts. The sample, consisting of 35 White females, 23 Latinas, 65 White males and 15 Latinos, comes from archival data from UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. The initial plan was to conduct t-tests to compare the depression scores of Latinos and Whites and males and females and multiple regressions to determine whether living alone and widowhood would predict higher depression scores. However, the assumption of normality of the tests were not met. Therefore non-parametric tests were used to analyze the data. No significant differences were found for ethnicity, gender, living alone, and widowhood. Spearman correlations were used to find out if number of chronic illnesses was associated with depression. No significant association was found. In addition no significant differences were found when examining if Latinos would endorse a greater number of symptoms of sadness, guilt, and somatization than Whites. One reason why no differences were found between groups that were being examined is due to the fact that the entire sample came from a low-income population. Low income is associated with higher depression when compared to a non-clinical sample (Pe-den, Rayens, Hall, & Grant, 2004). Consequently, having a low-income sample restricted the range in which one could detect a significant difference between the means of group. This restriction of range applied to all analyses involving depression scores, including correlations as well as comparison of means. In addition, there was an unequal distribution betweens groups of gender and ethnicity, with 65 White males to 15 Latinos and 35 White females to 23 Latinas. These numbers may not have been sufficient to show significant differences between groups. |
