Abstract

Marital relationship has been shown to be consistently related to women's depressive symptomatology. The purpose of this study was to delineate the role of self-esteem and marital relationship in the development of depression. It was hypothesized that both good marital relationship and high self-esteem protect women from depressive symptomatology. Two-hundred and seventy five women were recruited from 4 private obstetrics and gynecology clinics and 2 university hospitals. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). the Dyadic Adjustment Scale(DAS), and the Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale(SE) were used. At the first stage of analysis, we divided the subjects into four groups -high DAS/high SE, high DAS/low SE. low DAS/high SE. and low DAS/low SE- and examined the differences in depressive symptomatology among them. It was demonstrated that the groups with either satisfying marital relationship or high sef-esteem had lower rate of depressives. At the second stage. DAS was factor analyzed using Maximum Likelihood. varimax rotation. Four factors- dyadic consensus, dyadic satisfaction. dyadic cohesion and dyadic activity- emerged. Finally. Baron and Kenny's test of mediation was utilized to find out whether the effects of factor analytically derived subscales of DAS were mediated or moderated by self-esteem in predicting depressive symptomatology. Results indicated that dyadic consensus was mediated by self-esteem and dyadic satisfaction had a rather direct effect on depression.