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Association amongst social support inside or outside the family and depression symptoms: longitudinal study of urban–rural differences in China

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose is to analyze the longitudinal association between social support inside and outside the family and depression and the differences between urban and rural areas.

Methods

A total of 11,150 respondents were included from Harmonized China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (Harmonized CHARLS). The baseline data and the subsequent two surveys were used to describe the basic characteristics and social support in the urban and rural. The growth curve model was used to analyse the longitudinal association between social support inside and outside the family and depression.

Results

People participating in social activities were less likely to suffer from depression while those who had public transfer were more likely to suffer from depression. Respondents who had weekly contact with their children were less likely to suffer from depression. Respondents with larger families were also less likely to suffer from depression, but this effect was significant in rural. As time changes, the association between social activities and depression does not change significantly, only public transfer and family size show a gradually weakening impact on depression in rural areas. The association between the contact with children and depression scores weakens in rural areas but increases in urban areas.

Conclusions

Future dynamic intervention for depression can include holding various beneficial social activities, carrying forward the filial piety culture and improving the level of rural social welfare, protecting the excellent traditional culture, and providing public services for rural special families.

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Data availability

Our dataset is available on http://charls.pku.edu.cn/zh-CN/page/data/harmonized_charls.

Code availability

The code used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

The research was supported by: (1) National Natural Science Foundation of China (72074086); (2) National Natural Science Foundation of China (71673093); (3) Humanities and Social Sciences of Ministry of Education Planning Fund (16YJA840013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health Management, School of Medicine and Health Management, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430030, Hubei, China

    Chaoyang Yan, Hui Liao, Ying Ma & Jing Wang

  2. The Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Science of Hubei Province, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430030, Hubei, China

    Jing Wang

  3. Institute for Poverty Reduction and development, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430030, Hubei, China

    Jing Wang

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  1. Chaoyang Yan
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  2. Hui Liao
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  4. Jing Wang
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Contributions

CY conceived the idea and wrote the manuscript. HL and YM provided suggestions for the discussion of the manuscript. JW critically revised the paper. The author(s) read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jing Wang.

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Ethical approval for data collection in CHARLS was obtained from the Biomedical Ethics Review Committee of Peking University (IRB00001052–11015).

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Yan, C., Liao, H., Ma, Y. et al. Association amongst social support inside or outside the family and depression symptoms: longitudinal study of urban–rural differences in China. Qual Life Res 31, 1677–1687 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-022-03086-2

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