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Randomized Controlled Trial
. 2015 Dec 2;10(12):e0143612.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0143612. eCollection 2015.

The Role of Family Environment in Depressive Symptoms among University Students: A Large Sample Survey in China

Yunmiao Yu  1 , Xiuxian Yang  1 , Yanjie Yang  1 , Lu Chen  2 , Xiaohui Qiu  1 , Zhengxue Qiao  1 , Jiawei Zhou  1 , Hui Pan  2 , Bo Ban  3 , Xiongzhao Zhu  4 , Jincai He  5 , Yongqing Ding  6 , Bing Bai  7
Affiliations
Randomized Controlled Trial

The Role of Family Environment in Depressive Symptoms among University Students: A Large Sample Survey in China

Yunmiao Yu et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Objective: To explore the relationship between family environment and depressive symptoms and to evaluate the influence of hard and soft family environmental factors on depression levels in a large sample of university students in China.

Methods: A multi-stage stratified sampling procedure was used to select 6,000 participants. The response rate was 88.8%, with 5,329 students completing the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Family Environment Scale Chinese Version (FES-CV), which was adapted for the Chinese population. Differences between the groups were tested for significance by the Student's t-test; ANOVA was used to test continuous variables. The relationship between soft family environmental factors and BDI were tested by Pearson correlation analysis. Hierarchical linear regression analysis was conducted to model the effects of hard environmental factors and soft environmental factors on depression in university students.

Results: A total of 11.8% of students scored above the threshold of moderate depression (BDI≧14). Hard family environmental factors such as parent relationship, family economic status, level of parental literacy and non-intact family structure were associated with depressive symptoms. The soft family environmental factors--conflict and control--were positively associated with depression, while cohesion was negatively related to depressive symptom after controlling for other important associates of depression. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that the soft family environment correlates more strongly with depression than the hard family environment.

Conclusions: Soft family environmental factors--especially cohesion, conflict and control--appeared to play an important role in the occurrence of depressive symptoms. These findings underline the significance of the family environment as a source of risk factors for depression among university students in China and suggest that family-based interventions and improvement are very important to reduce depression among university students.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Grants and funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31271093) to Prof. Yanjie Yang and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81202213) to Xiuxian Yang.