how do adolescents define depression? - cIRcle - University of ...

along with their family's permission, participated in this study. Another methodological
Chapter V: Discussion
limitation to this study was that the study sample was ethnically diverse and teachers were the
only ones to identify students who were able to comprehend oral and written English. Reading
literacy was not examined to establish if there were any differences in participants' abilities to
express themselves in English. Further, requiring the participants to understand written and
spoken English may have excluded some immigrant students from this study.
Second, adolescents' conceptions of depression were limited to descriptive definitions of
depression, and did not provide the dimensions of their meaning. For example, the subcategory
"Sadness" lacked the information as to its severity of sadness (e.g., deep sadness, very sad).
Further, definitions were limited in that the context of "sadness" was missing (e.g., sad with their
life, sad at school). Gaining knowledge about these contextual factors that adolescents feel sad
about may have provided a fuller understanding of their "Sadness" in defining depression.
Third, the assessment measures used to measure depressive symptomatology present a
limitation. The use of other informants for the assessment of depression in adolescents avoids the
inherent difficulty of self-report and the possibility of distortion of self-report observations.
Hence, the data from this study may be questionable because it was based on the subjective
appraisal of the participants, and can produce biased results where distortions arise as recall
periods are longer (Mechanic, 1978). However, adolescent depression should not be considered
as a condition independent of the respondent, and adolescents are in the best position to know
their feelings and behaviors in different situations. The inclusion of a third subthreshold
depressive symptomatology group between the non-depressed and the depressed group, may
have supported a richer concept with more levels of depression in adolescence. This means that
various factors analyzed against the three classified groups, could have refined and broadened
the dimensional differentiations among the groups and detection of depressive symptomatology.
Moreover, because this study was on adolescents' understanding of depression, the participants
may have been hesitant to express their status via self-reports in the survey. Another item,
adolescents' thinking about own need to talk to someone when depressed, lacked time recall,
hence can be subject to memory and other distortions (Mojtabai et al., 2002). Limiting the recall
period to the past 12 months may have provided more depth to this question.
Fourth, ethnicity and socioeconomic status were not delineated in adolescents'
conceptions of depression or other analysis in this study. Hence, generalizability of these
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