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Internalized Racism and Past-Year Major Depressive Disorder Among African-Americans: the Role of Ethnic Identity and Self-Esteem

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Abstract

Although a large body of research focuses on discrimination as a risk for depression among African-Americans, only a dearth of research focuses on internalized racism (i.e., endorsement of negative stereotypes of one’s racial group) as a risk factor. In addition, no studies have yet to examine mediators and/or moderators of the relationship between internalized racism and depression. To this end, the present study examined the mediating and moderating roles of (a) self-esteem and (b) ethnic identity on the relationship between internalized racism and past-year major depressive disorder (MDD), in a nationally representative sample of African-American adults (N = 3570) from the National Survey of American Life. Results from this study revealed an indirect association between internalized racism and past-year MDD via self-esteem, but no indirect relationship via ethnic identity. Further, results show that both self-esteem and ethnic identity individually moderate the relationship between internalized racism and past-year MDD. Collectively, these findings suggest a need to further investigate mechanisms through which internalized racism impacts mental health and factors that strengthen and/or weaken the association between internalized racism and depression.

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Notes

  1. Data analytic strategy followed Molina and James [26].

  2. Appendix 1 shows estimates for path analysis covariates.

  3. Appendix 2 shows estimates for models 1 and 2 covariates.

  4. All model 1 results remained the same when covariates were excluded: internalized racism, OR = 1.36, SE = .29, p = .160, 95 %CI [.88, 2.10]; self-esteem, OR = .18, SE = .02, p < .001, 95 % CI [.14, .23]; internalized racism by self-esteem, OR = 1.93, SE = .51, p = .019, 95 % CI [1.12, 3.31].

  5. All model 2 changed when covariates were excluded: internalized racism, OR = 1.55, SE = .30, p = .029, 95 % CI [1.05, 2.30]; ethnic identity, OR = .67, SE = .08, p = .002, 95 % CI [.52, .85]; internalized racism by ethnic identity, OR = 1.61, SE = .27, p = .008, 95 % CI [1.14, 2.25].

  6. To examine whether the hypothesized or alternate path models fit the data best, I compared Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) fit index values [37]. BIC values can be used to compare non-nested models with dichotomous outcomes ([23]; [34]). When the BIC value between two models has a difference of 10 or more, the model with a lower BIC value is said to fit best to the data [33]. Comparing BIC values of the hypothesized, BIC = 12188.66, and alternate, BIC = 6030.12, paths suggest that the alternate path fits the data best. However, given the cross-sectional nature of the data, we should consider the theoretical meaningfulness of the relationships between all variables [10]. Thus, though the alternate path fits the data best statistically, the hypothesized path is in line with theory and past empirical research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1007 West Harrison Street, Chicago, IL, 60607-7137, USA

    Drexler James

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Correspondence to Drexler James.

Ethics declarations

Publicly available data has been used. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

The NSAL is mostly supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, with grant U01-MH57716. Other support came from the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Michigan. For this analysis, public data set was downloaded from Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Institute for Social Research at University of Michigan.

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The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 4 Weighted estimates of covariates for path model
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Appendix 2

Table 5 Weighted estimates for covariates for weighted logistic regressions
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James, D. Internalized Racism and Past-Year Major Depressive Disorder Among African-Americans: the Role of Ethnic Identity and Self-Esteem. J. Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities 4, 659–670 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-016-0269-1

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