Gender Differences in Suicide and Depression

The study uses a within-subjects design wherein all participants are exposed to two treatment blocks. In each of these blocks, participants will be shown one or more hypothetical scenarios. A scenario involves a list of depression symptoms and the frequency of their occurrence. The study uses a within-subjects design wherein all participants are exposed to two treatment blocks. In each of these blocks, participants will be shown one or more hypothetical scenarios. A scenario consists of a list of depression symptoms and the frequency of their occurrence over the past two weeks. The displayed symptoms are chosen from the PHQ-9 questionnaire, which is a widely used (and often self-administered) instrument that screens for depressive disorders. The list of symptoms and frequencies are randomly chosen to meet certain thresholds which indicate different levels of depression severity.

After reviewing the hypothetical scenario, participants are asked to state their views on: (i) whether the symptoms indicate that the subject of the scenario suffers from depression (recognition), (ii) perceptions of depression severity, (iii) the likelihood of seeking help from different sources, and (iv) beliefs and attitudes regarding depression and mental health.

2024-10-23

2024-10-31

The three primary outcomes are Recognize, Correct and Seek help. Recognize is a binary variable equal to 1 if the answer to Q1 is definitely yes or probably yes, and 0 otherwise. Correct is the outcome to assess whether participants assess the severity of depression correctly. It takes the value of 1 if the severity level is identified correctly and 0 otherwise. Seek help captures the willingness to seek help after seeing the list of symptoms and answering Q1 and Q2. We will use the responses to Q3 to generate an outcome variable which equals 1 if the response is somewhat likely or very likely for one or more of the options presented in Q3 and 0 otherwise.

The first set of secondary outcomes contained whether help would be sought from a mental health specialist or from non-specialists. The specialist variable will be equal to 1 if the response is somewhat likely or very likely in at least one of options 1-3 in Q3 and 0 otherwise. The non-specialist variable will be equal to 1 if the response is somewhat likely or very likely in at least one of options 4-6 in Q3 and 0 otherwise.

The second set of secondary outcomes we intend to capture three different factors that could underlie gender differences in recognizing depression and seeking help. We refer to these three factors as perceptions, psychic costs and norms.

To capture gender differences in perceptions we will generate binary outcomes from each of the answer options in Q4. Each of these variables would be equal to one if the response is somewhat or strongly agree and 0 otherwise. We will also generate an index summarizing the perceptions in a single variable.

To study psychic costs, we will use the Self and Other scenarios and create a binary variable equal to 1 if the scenario being evaluated corresponds to Other.

To study norms, we will survey responses to Q5.

The experiment involves randomly choosing a list of depression symptoms and severity of symptoms from the PhQ-9 questionnaire to build a scenario that participants are prompted to assess. The two treatment blocks refer to who is the subject of the scenario (Self or Other). we choose symptoms (i.e., items form the PHQ-9 scale) and frequencies so that the combinations of symptoms and frequencies gives an overall score between 5 and 27.

Not available

All participants see scenarios in both Self and Other in randomized order. The list of symptoms and frequencies is randomly selected based on a pre-defined algorithm.

Individual - within subject.

No

Non-clustered design.

300 individuals who evaluate 4 scenarios.

1200 observations from 300 individuals who evaluate 4 scenarios each.