Depression tendency between working housewives and non-working housewives in a medium: small city in the suburb of Seoul

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: In traditional society, the roles of housewives were to do housework, to look after her children and to give her family emotional stability. With rapid social and economic change, the traditional sense of value changes and the concepts of sexual roles, too. However, they are in a transition period yet. These discord and tension followed by role change appeared as the form of psychological instability or social pathological problem in modern family. Thus, this study aimed to avaluate the effect of employment on depression of housewives who play importent roles in family and their commumity. METHODS: From May to July 1996, the questonnaires were distributed to 179 housewives who have university education background(including community college), and have one or more children and live in Bundang-Ku of Sungnam city, making a distinction between working housewives and nonworking housewives. Regarding the subjects of this study, the non-working housewives are restricted to full-time housewives who have no job, and working housewives who have full-time job. As tools of measurement, we used BDI questionnaires consisted of 15 items in Korean. We performed statistical analysis among the data by means of SPSS/PC+. We analyzed statistical data for significance using one-way ANOVA and analyzed categorical data for significance using S-test. RESULTS: The average score on BDI for working housewives was 12.22(standard deviation 7.42) and this is rather higher than that of non-working housewives(10.80, standard deviation 7.42). But the number of children increased, the BDI score were higher significantly in both groups. And the BDI score was high in working Housewives groups whose husbands had professional job or dommerce job, whose family system is a multi-generation family, and who feel a lot of fatigue after work. In case of non-working housewives, the BDI score was high with age(especially between 50-59), duration of marriage, lower income and Duvalls family life cycle 6, 7. CONCLUSIONS: There is no difference in depression tendency between working housewives and nonworking housewives. But in case of working housewives, some factors have influence on their depression tendency, the number of children, husbands job, family type, degree of fatigue after work. And in case of non-working housewives, the factors are the number of children, age, duration of marriage, income, family life cycle.