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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Social relations and depression in late life
— a systematic review | | Author(s) | Michaela Schwarzbach, Melanie Luppa, Simon Forstmeier |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 29, no 1, January 2014 |
| Publisher | Wiley Blackwell, January 2014 |
| Pages | pp 1-21 |
| Source | www.orangejournal.org |
| Keywords | Depression ; Social contacts ; Personal relationships ; Literature reviews. |
| Annotation | Social relations have become the focus of much research attention when studying depressive symptoms in older adults. Research indicates that social support and being embedded in a network may reduce the risk for depression. The aim of this review was to analyse the association of social relations and depression in older adults. Electronic databases were searched systematically for potentially relevant articles published from 2000 to 2012, and 37 studies met the inclusion criteria. Factors of social relations were categorised into 12 domains. Factors regarding the qualitative aspects of social relations seem to be more consistent among studies and therefore provide more explicit results. Thus social support, quality of relations and presence of confidants were identified as factors of social relations significantly associated with depression. The quantitative aspects of social relations seem to be more inconsistent. Cultural differences become most obvious in terms of the quantitative aspects of social relations. Despite the inconsistent results and the methodological limitations of the studies, this review identified a number of factors of social relations that are significantly associated with depression. The review indicates that there is a need to investigate social relations in all their complexity and not reduce them to one dimension. At the same time it is important to conduct longitudinal studies because studies with cross-sectional design do not allow us to draw conclusions on causality. Beyond that, cultural differences need to be considered. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-150529241 A |
| Classmark | ENR: TOA: DS: 64A |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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