The role of affective family attributes and family rules in the prediction of depressive symptoms in adolescents

Abstract

Depressive symptoms in adolescents are a major problem in today’s society, and it is well established that family environment, as well as sociodemographic variables, such as sex, age and socio-economic status (SES), contributes to them. However, family attributes are not accurately defined, some of them sharing characteristics but differing in labels, which reveals the different theoretical and methodological frameworks of the studies focusing on family attributes. Thus, the genuine family attributes responsible for the depressive symptoms when both sociodemographic variables and other family attributes are controlled remain unclear. In this study, we aimed to rise above these limitations both employing an inclusive and widely used measure of family attributes, the Family Assesment Device (FAD), and a methodological approach that allow identifying the family attributes that contribute to depressive symptoms, but also isolating the effect of each family attribute from others, thus revealing their real/unique effects. For this purpose, we used regression analyses, as well as Pratt’s measure, which qualifies us to quantify the non-shared amount of depressive symptoms explained for each family attribute. Our results showed that, although all the family variables measured by FAD seemed to be related to depressive symptoms, when a proper analysis was carried out that controlled for the overlapping between them, only affective responsiveness (AR), affective involvement (AI), and behavioural control (BC) genuinely predicted adolescent depressive symptoms. As a conclusion, our results showed that, as expected, the affective family attributes (AR and AI) are of paramount importance to prevent adolescent depression but, interestingly, also revealed that the existence and obedience of rules within the family (BC) also play an important role to its prevention.