Influence of Socio-Economic Status on Depression, Anxiety and Stress among Rural Adolescent Girls

Abstract

The present study aims to study how socio-economic status of the adolescent girls in rural areas affect their psychological status with reference to depression, anxiety and stress.  A total of 414 adolescent girls were randomly selected.  They were administered SES scale developed by Meenakshi (2004) and DASS scale by Lovibond and Lovibond (1995), which measured depression, anxiety and stress of an individual. One way ANOVA was employed to find out the significance of mean differences between adolescent girls with varied SES background on depression, anxiety and stress. Results revealed that SES had significant influence over depression scores of adolescent girls, where adolescent girls in poor SES had least depression scores and those who with below average SES had highest depression scores and others in between. SES did not have significant influence over anxiety of adolescent girls belonging to rural areas. In the case of stress, though not statistically significant, comparatively those adolescent girls in poor SES had least stress compared to the adolescent girls in rest of the SES groups.