Browsing by Subject "over-indebtedness"

Over-indebtedness has been identified as a risk factor for several health outcomes. However, the health effects of parental over-indebtedness on children are less well known, and longitudinal panel data and health registers haven’t been used for this purpose. Researching the effects of over-indebtedness is topical: in 2013 the number of credit default entries exceeded those following the 1990’s depression, suggesting that over-indebtedness is a persisting problem. This thesis is a part of the currently ongoing Social Consequences of Recession research project, studying the long and short term effects of recession periods on income, illness and mortality. The project is funded by the Academy of Finland. The aim of this thesis is to test whether parental over-indebtedness is a determinant for depression in the Finnish national 1987 birth cohort, consisting of 59476 individuals. Several administrative and health registers are linked to the data. Two different explanations are considered to explain the possible connection found between parental over-indebtedness and depression: the life-course approach and the family economic stress model. Survival analysis is used to analyze the cumulative incidence for antidepressants purchases, which are used as a proxy for psychiatric morbidity. The cumulative rate of new purchases among children with an over-indebted parent and others will be assessed using Kaplan-Meier estimates. Hazard rates for over-indebted parents are estimated with the Cox regression model. Direct effects will be estimated first, with confounding factors – parental depression, parental marital status and parental education – added in the subsequent models. Boys and girls are analyzed separately. The results indicate that children of over-indebted parents face elevated risk for depression, even when adjusted for previously well-known and studied predictors of adolescent depression. The results suggest that financial distress in the childhood home intertwines with other childhood risk factors of depression and contributes to the clustering of adverse childhood experiences. Over-indebtedness is more common in already disadvantaged groups and exacerbates social disparity. By reducing economic and social resources in a childhood environment that may be necessary for upward social mobility, it could add to the intergenerational transmission of inequality.