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

Chapter III: Methodology
of death (Holcomb, Neimeyer, & Moore, 1993; Yang & Chen, 2006), on concepts of emotion
(Fehr & Russell, 1984, 1991; Russell & Fehr, 1994) on concepts of pleasure (Dube & Le Bel,
2003), and informed by the cognitive developmental theory of Piaget (e.g., Chapman, 1988).
To facilitate as many entries that came readily to mind, the participants were asked (in the
oral and written directions) to consider how a depressed person their age would think, or feel, or
act, if he or she were depressed, and to include all aspects of this person. An entire page titled,
"Understanding of Depression" was allocated to this question and two additional pages in order
to ensure ample space to respond. There was no set limit as to the number of definitions the
participants had to stop listing responses. To keep from biasing the formulation of respondents'
own COAD, and to control the amount of time spent on this item, this measure was presented as
the first measure (Holcomb et al., 1993) immediately after the demographic section of the
questionnaire.
Self-Recognition of Adolescent Depression
To evaluate adolescents' self-reports of self-assessed recognition or detection identified
as depression in self, a measure Self-Recognition of Adolescent Depression (S-ROAD) was
developed for use in the present study (Appendix F). As part of this measure, one forced-choice
question, "Thinking of your own definition or description of depression, would you consider
yourself to have ever been depressed?" was used to determine participants' self-assessed
presence or absence of depression in self. Time recall in those who recognized depression in self
was assessed using the question, "When did you feel this way?" This item had five Likert-style
values, from "presently or in the past two weeks," to "more than 12 months ago" prior to the
survey (Appendix G1).
The S-ROAD has its roots in the Recognition of Adolescent Depression (ROAD) (Fuks
Geddes, 1997) that was initially developed to examine recognition of depression in self in a
sample of 340 adolescents from a cohort sample of 1,947 Victorian secondary students in
Australia. The ROAD was administered in Wave Five (of six Waves) of the Victorian
Adolescent Health Cohort Study (AHCS) to assess mental health problems, health risk
behaviors, and health factors in adolescents. In a theoretical paper, Cauce et al. (2002)
distinguish that help-seeking can begin only when a problem or mental health need is recognized
as an epidemiologically defined need or as a subjective or perceived need.
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