Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

Effects of Adolescent Domestic Violence, Poverty and Depressive Symptoms on Adult Depressive Trajectories among Women Who Experienced an Unintended Adolescent Pregnancy

Purpose: Despite the high risk adolescent mothers face of intimate partner violence (IPV), little is known about the long-term effects of adolescent victimization on adult mental health, particularly within the context of the often co-occurring problem of economic insecurity faced by many teen mothers. The study reported here uses longitudinal data spanning 14 years from a study of adolescent mothers to evaluate the effects of adolescent exposure to IPV and economic insecurity on the trajectories of depressive symptoms over time. Method: This research uses prospective data from a study of 234 adolescent mothers recruited from community settings. The sample used for this study is racially diverse. Adolescent domestic violence is measured using the Conflict Tactics Scale, and is defined as physical abuse or threat of physical abuse from an intimate partner prior to age 18. Depressive symptoms are measured at eight waves during adulthood using the depression subscale from the Brief Symptom Inventory. Economic insecurity is measured by assessing whether respondents used welfare as their primary means of financial support. Depression trajectories were assessed using latent growth curve modeling. Results: Descriptive results show that 67.2% of adolescent mothers reported at least one episode of IPV prior to turning 18. In the first stage of analysis, trajectories of depressive symptoms were created. The conditional model was tested next; the growth factors (intercept and slope) were specified as an outcome of adolescent IPV, cumulative welfare use, and pre-existing depressive symptoms while simultaneously modeling time-varying effects of IPV on the corresponding time point indicator of depression. This model fit the data well with a CFI of .91 and an RMSEA of .067. In the test of the effects of the covariates on depressive trajectories, we found that adolescent IPV and pre-existing depression, but not economic insecurity, were significantly related to the intercept, but not the slope of the depressive symptom trajectories. Analysis of the time-varying covariates further show that the concurrent association between domestic violence and depressive symptoms is significant in the majority of waves studied. Implications: Even after taking into account the effect of pre-existing depressive symptoms, adolescent IPV had a unique effect on the initial level of depressive symptoms women reported. However, despite several studies that have shown that economic insecurity increases depressive symptoms, that was not the case in this study. Economic insecurity was not significantly related to either the intercept or the slope of depressive trajectories. Descriptively, women who reported high levels of adolescent IPV entered adulthood with higher levels of depressive symptomatology than their counterparts and these levels remained high throughout the time period we assessed. These findings indicate that early exposure to IPV can have significant, long-term consequences for women's psychological well-being. Word count = 445