Perceived Changes in Personal Circumstances Related to Social Change
Associations with Psychosocial Resources and Depressive Symptoms
Abstract
Social change is a ubiquitous phenomenon comprising tendencies such as globalization, demographic change, and pluralization of biographical trajectories. Based on stress theories and related challenge-response models, the present study investigated whether depressive symptoms were related to an accumulation of perceived demands associated with social change in a sample of 2,522 German adolescents and adults. In addition, buffering effects of personal and social resources on the association between perceived demands and depressive symptoms were tested. By means of structural equation modeling, we found that accumulations of work-, family-, and public life-related demands were associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms, even after controlling for demographic and other confounding variables. Optimism and social support were found to be associated with lower depressive symptoms. Furthermore, both optimism and social support reduced the size of associations between demands of social change and depressive symptoms. Overall, these results underscore the association of social change and psychosocial resources with individuals’ depressive symptoms.
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