Date of Award

2021

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology

Specialization

Behavioral Sciences

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Andrea Paiva

Abstract

Since depression disorders have been found to be the leading cause of disability (Friedrich, 2017), affecting 17.3 million adults in the United States alone (National Institute of Mental Health, 2017). Various scales have been developed to measure depression. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health uses the Major Depression Episode module to measure lifetime depression symptoms, this is the scale the current work aims to validate. The selected model had adequate fit. It was also found to be invariant at the strictest level across gender, race, income, and education level. The validated scale was then used to study the relationship between depression and alcohol use. The comorbidity of depression and alcohol use has been common in our society for many years (Floud et al., 2015). The purpose of the current study is to investigate the role that race, gender, and socioeconomic status have on the comorbidity between depression and alcohol use. There were differences between depression symptoms and alcohol use on the socioeconomic demographics. However, there were no moderation effects. This indicates that sociodemographics do play a role in both depression symptoms and alcohol use, even though they do not change the relationship. The implications of these studies are two-fold, it sets up future research to be done people who may not have depression but screen into a depression scale to determine how these factors effect.

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