Socioeconomic pathways to depressive symptoms in adulthood: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979

The existence of a direct effect of early socioeconomic position (SEP) on adult mental health outcomes net of adult SEP is still debated. This question demands the explicit modeling of pathways linking early SEP to adult SEP and mental health. In light of this background, we pursue two objectives in this study. First, we examine whether depressive symptoms in adulthood can be fit in a trajectory featuring both an intercept, or baseline range of depressive symptoms that varied between individuals, and a slope describing the average evolution of depressive symptoms over the years. Second, we estimate the direct and indirect pathways linking early SEP, respondents' education and adult household income, with a particular focus on whether early SEP retains a significant direct effect on the trajectory of depressive symptoms once adult SEP is entered into the pathway model. Drawing from 29 years of cohort data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, a survey that has been following a national probability sample of American civilian and military youth (Zagorsky and White, 1999), we used structural equation models to estimate the pathways between parents' education, respondent's education, and latent growth curves of household income and depressive symptoms. We found that the effect of parents' education was entirely mediated by respondent's education. In turn, the effect of respondent's education was largely mediated by household income. In conclusion, our findings showed that the socioeconomic attainment process that is rooted in parents' education and leads to respondent's education and then to household income is a crucial pathway for adult mental health. These results suggest that increasing educational opportunities may be an effective policy to break the intergenerational transmission of low socioeconomic status and poor mental health. ► Parents' education had an inverse relationship with respondents' depressive symptoms in adulthood. ► This relationship was fully explained by respondents' education. ► In turn, the effect of respondent's education was also largely mediated by their household income. ► Adult depressive symptoms are the outcome of life course pathways of social attainment rooted in parents' education. ► Increasing educational opportunities may break the intergenerational transmission of low status and poor mental health.