TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2016//
TI  - "Female preponderance" of depression in non-clinical populations: a meta-analytic study
JO  - Frontiers in psychology
A1  - Wang, Kui
A1  - Lu, Han
A1  - Cheung, Eric F. C.
A1  - Neumann, David L.
A1  - Shum, David H. K.
A1  - Chan, Raymond C. K.
SP  - e1398
EP  - e1398
VL  - 7
IS  - 
N2  - Clinical observations and research suggest a female preponderance in major depressive disorder. However, it is unclear whether a similar gender difference is found for the reporting of depressive symptoms in non-clinical populations. The present meta-analysis was conducted to address this issue. We searched for published papers targeting non-clinical populations in which the 21-item Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used. Eighty-four papers (91 studies) published between 1977 and 2014 were included in the final meta-analysis, which comprised 23,579 males and 29,470 females. Females in the general population reported higher level of depressive symptoms than males (d = -0.187, corresponding to 1.159 points in the 21-item BDI). This pattern was not found to influence by years of publication, socioeconomic status, or version of the BDI used. Using age group as a moderator, studies with adolescents and young adults were found to show a smaller effect size than studies with older participants. Our results appear to confirm the "female preponderance" in the level of self-report depressive symptoms in the general population, and support the social gender role theory in explaining gender difference over biological susceptibility theory and evolutionary theory.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1664-1078
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01398
ID  - ref1
ER  -