Taiikugaku kenkyu (Japan Journal of Physical Education, Health and Sport Sciences)
Online ISSN : 1881-7718
Print ISSN : 0484-6710
ISSN-L : 0484-6710
Materials
Analysis of depressive symptoms and daily living stressors among university undergraduates in the Kyushu area
Kazuyoshi TamaeShirou KinjoHiroyuki Teruya
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2010 Volume 55 Issue 1 Pages 203-218

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Abstract

To investigate the structure of daily living stressors and mental health status, we distributed a self-report questionnaire to a sample of 279 undergraduates of a university in the Kyushu area. Evaluable data were obtained from 231 undergraduates, yielding an effective response rate of 82.8%. The score for the Center for Epidemiologic Study Depression Scale (CES-D) in the present sample was 19.07 (SD=9.01), which was higher than results obtained in previous studies. Data for daily living stressor items were subjected to factor analysis, followed by varimax rotation. The factor analysis yielded six factors: task for study, spiritless daily living, part-time employment, traffic accidents, business and constraints of daily living, and laziness with study. Chronbach reliability coefficients indicated that our original stressor scale had medium or sufficient internal consistency. Comprehensively, it was revealed that the present daily living stressors had high commonality across the CES-D scale/subscale. In particular, the task for study and spiritless daily living were correlated with the CES-D score, showing a higher correlation than other daily living factors. Therefore these two stressors may be suitable for identification of depressive symptoms. On the other hand, although the response for traffic accidents was low, it was considered that this type of daily living stressor might have a partial influence on depressive symptoms among university undergraduates. Our findings indicated that daily living stressors were detectable from descriptive data based on the demographic characteristics of the present cohort. Accordingly, our results suggest that the present set of stressors were meaningfully subjective for undergraduates in the department of education and should be taken into account to fully understand the actual mental status of undergraduates and for formulating the ideal situation in a university for the mental health of the students.

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© 2010 Japan Society of Physical Education, Health and Sport Sciences
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