Comparison of Working and Non-Working Mother Adolescents

Relation Among Depression, Loneliness and Self-efficacy of Adolescents of Working and Non-Working Mother

• Sadia Afrin

Summary

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the relation among depression, loneliness and self-efficacy of adolescents of working and non-working mothers whether mother’s occupation has any effects on adolescent’s depression, loneliness and self-efficacy. Assess whether depression, loneliness and self-efficacy of adolescents differ by gender or not. The participants of the relevant study will be 100 adolescents of working mothers where 50 will male and 50 will female and 100 adolescents of non-working mothers where 50 will male and 50 will female between the age group of 15 to 18 years selected purposively by convenience sampling technique. To collect the data I will use Bangla Version (Pervin, 2007) of the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell, Dan, 1978), The Depression Scale (Rahman & Uddin, 2005), and adopted Bengali Version (Ilyas, 2005) of Sherer’s (1982) General Self-Efficacy Scale. Descriptive and correlation statistical techniques will be employed to depict the quantitative data. Successful completion of the project will add a worthy picture of risk factors of adolescents.

Introduction

Adolescence comes from Latin word “adolescere” which means “to grow up”. It is a transitional stage of physical and psychological human development that generally occurs during the period from puberty to legal adulthood. We all face different emotion, feeling in all over in our life. Depression is an emotional state marked by great sadness and apprehension, feelings of worthlessness and guilt, loss of interest and pleasure in usual activities. So it is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person’s thoughts, behavior, feelings and sense of well being. According to the National Comorbidity Survey-Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A), about 11% of adolescents have a depressive disorder by age 18. Girls are experiencing depression more likely than boys. Depression in adolescents is probably under diagnosed because the symptoms can be difficult to recognize. Loneliness is an unpleasant experience that occurs when a network of social relationships of a person is significantly deficient whether qualitatively or quantitatively. This definition consists two points of agreement. First, loneliness comes from a deficiency in a person’s social relationships. It happens when there is a mismatch between a person’s actual social relations and the person’s needs or desires for social contact. Second, loneliness is not synonymous with social isolation; it is person’s subjective experience. So it can be said that, Lonelinessis unpleasant and unexpected emotional response to isolation or separation or lack of companionship. Although loneliness comes time to time of all age but during adolescence (particularly early adolescence) it is stayed in peak because of many changes in social expectations, roles, relationships, and identities, which may increase the experience of loneliness. Self-efficacy one’s perceived capabilities for learning and performing actions at designated levels. It is the power or strength of one’s belief in one’s own ability to finish tasks and reach aims. According to Albert Bandura, self-efficacy is “the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations.” In other words, self-efficacy is a person’s belief in his or her ability to succeed in a particular situation. Many researchers are counting academic competence as self efficacy which begins to decline in grade 7 or earlier.

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Research in where using longer depression scales such as the Beck Depression Inventory also find a strong relationship between loneliness and depression. The consistent association of loneliness and depression Bragg (1979) proposed a distinction between “depressed loneliness” and “non-depressed loneliness.” In a study of college students, Bragg found that depressed loneliness was associated with fairly global negativity, seen in dissatisfaction with social relations, school, work, and many facets of life. In contrast, non-depressed lonely people expressed dissatisfaction only with their social relations; they were not necessarily unhappy about other aspects of their lives. Cognitive processes may also influence the loneliness-depression link. Lonely people who blame themselves for their social problems and who attribute their loneliness to unchangeable factors may be most prone to depression. Self-efficacy makes a difference to as how people feel, think, and act. High self-efficacy allows individuals to choose challenging settings and explore their environment or create new ones. While Bandura (1997) reported that a low self-efficacy is associated with a low self-esteem, Heslin and Klehe (2006) noted that self-efficacy is related to the experience of stress and work burnout. Specifically, low self-efficacy can lead to a sense of helplessness and hopelessness about one’s capability of self-esteem. Dussault and Deaudelin (2001) found a negative correlation between self-efficacy and loneliness (r = – .25). This finding suggests that loneliness is more likely exists in people who have lower self-efficacy.

Every moment mothers are working for children, in this study working mother indicating them who are attached with job, business almost five years at this time and non-working means mothers who are only housewives. According to Raymond Montemayor & Mark D. Clayton (1967), maternal employment might be more likely to result in problems for adolescents when it takes place in the context of family instability, undesirable peer influences and lack of maternal supervision. Lakhe (2003) completed a study which has the aim to see the social adjustment of the adolescents of working and non-working mothers. The result was found that adolescent’s total level of adjustments of working mother is higher than non-working mother. Suprerna Khanna studied on relationship between emotional intelligence and social maturity of adolescent children of working and non-working mothers. This study also found significant social maturity in adolescent children of working mothers than non-working mothers.

Rationale of the study:

In Bangladesh, there are almost 27.7million adolescents’. Among them, a significant numbers are suffering different mental health problems like anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, low self-efficacy etc. In previous study we saw that adolescents whose mothers work in outside will suffer more mental health problems such as depression, loneliness and low self-efficacy than the adolescents whose mother stay in home. The rationale of the study is that, at first we measure whether the adolescents of working women and non-working women differ in the level of depression, loneliness and self-efficacy. If there found any differences then we say that there may remain some risk factors towards the differences in depression, loneliness and self-efficacy regarding their working status (working women, non-working women).

The findings of the proposed study might help the improvement of adolescent’s life. Adolescent’s loneliness and self-efficacy are correlated with depression. If their loneliness is high or low then their depression will be high or low. And it also hypothesized that high-low self-efficacy is also correlated with low-high depression. If these correlations are founded the further extensive study on those areas will lead to explore risk factors and positive factors. Statistics shows that 30 percent of teens with depression also develop a substance abuse problem, lonely teens struggle with relationships and more dangerous thing is untreated depression is the number one cause of suicide, so if we can assume that adolescent child of working mother has these risk factors we can prevent these factors and also working mothers can concerns about their children and they can make different environment where child can not feel lonely, do not be depressed and make high self efficacy.

Objectives of the study:

The objectives of the present study are to:

1. Investigate the relationship among depression, loneliness and self-efficacy of adolescents of working and non-working mothers.

2. Whether mother’s occupation has any effects on adolescent’s depression, loneliness and self-efficacy.

3. Assess whether depression, loneliness and self-efficacy of adolescents differ by gender.

Method

Research Design

Cross sectional study. Quantitative research, Random individual interview.

Sample Size and Participants

Almost 50 thousands of adolescents of Dhaka City are population in this study. The present study will be conducted on 200 adolescents where 100 will be working mother’s adolescents and 100 will be non-working mother’s adolescents who will be selected purposively but some will be selected conveniently and randomly. First I will select the school or college conveniently where I can collect data easily and then select a class randomly, I select the students purposively (criteria mother’s occupation, gender). A total of 200 adolescents (male and female) will be taken from Rajuk Uttara Model College by convenience sampling technique. The age of the respondents was between 15 to 18 years. Distributions of participants are given in the table 1.

Table 1

Distribution of participants

Adolescents (Working Mother) Adolescents (Non-Working Mother)

Male 50 50

Female 50 50

Total 100 100 = 200

Instruments

Demographic and personal information questionnaire:

By this questionnaire, the data on age, gender, educational background, no. of siblings, family status, father’s occupation, and mother’s occupation’s details (job/business, duration, place), mothers’ age, mother’s educational background will be collected.

Bangla Version (Pervin, 2007) of the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell, Dan, 1978):

The revised UCLA Loneliness Scale was developed to measure loneliness. It is a 20 items 4 point Likert type scale. 20 items of English version were translated into Bengali. Each of the 20 items is scored such that 1 indicates lack of loneliness and a 4 indicates high level of loneliness. Thus, total scores of the scale can range from 20 to 80. Higher score means high level of loneliness and lower score means low feelings of loneliness.

The Depression Scale (Rahman & Uddin, 2005):

The depression scale was constructed to measure depression in the context of Bangladesh. It consisted of 30 items or statements. The answer options for each item of the scale were according to 5 point rating scale. Sum of all values indicated total score on the scale. The highest possible score of 30-items form of depression scale is 150 and the lowest possible score is 30. Higher score indicates higher depression and lower score indicates low level of depression.

Adapted Bangla Version (Ilyas, 2005) of Sherer et. al.’s (1982) General Self-Efficacy Scale:

This scale was used to measure degree of agreement with perceived personal ability to affect outcomes in various situations. It was a 17 items 5 point Likert type scale where scores ranged between 1(strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). 6 of the 17 items were negative and for these items the scoring was reversed. Total score in the scale ranged from 17-85 with higher score representing higher self-efficacy.

Procedure:

Necessary demographic information sheet will be prepared first; the standard data collection procedure will be followed with a view to obtaining data about depression, loneliness and self-efficacy of adolescents of working and non-working mothers. First, the participants will sit in a room and then a brief description will be given about the questionnaire. They will be also instructed not to discuss about anything with one another while answering the questions and they will be assured that their opinions would be kept as confidential. The questionnaire with bio-data form was administered individually and they will ask to answer all the questions by giving tick marks. Once the answers will be collected, the respondents will be thanked for their kind co-operation. I will code and analyze the collected data by using computer software SPSS version 16.0 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).

Ethics

Absence of the Ethical Committee I will not be able to collect Ethical Approval, but I will collect the permission of the Principle and Authority of the collage. I will also collect the consent of the students verbally.

Data Analyses

A descriptive analysis will be conducted of the variables such as gender, age, mother’s occupation. Then t-test analysis will be carried out to find out the differences between male and female adolescents. After that I will apply correlation statistics to find out the relationship among depression, loneliness and self-efficacy. Then a multiple regression analysis will be carried out to see how much depression, loneliness affect self-efficacy.

Time Frame

Annex 1

Objective-Data Collection Method analysis