Date of Conferral

2022

Degree

Doctor of Public Health (DrPH)

School

Public Health

Advisor

Wen-Hung Kuo

Abstract

Overt racial discrimination in the United States has been supplanted by subtle forms of everyday discrimination known as microaggressions. Researchers have found perceived everyday discrimination (PED) to be associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) among African Americans but have often treated the African American subpopulation as a homogeneous group. The purpose of this cross-sectional study grounded in the theory of microaggression was to illuminate probable associations between microaggressions based on weight, age, gender, ethnicity, and race and lifetime MDD among the Jamaican diaspora in the United States. Secondary data from the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiologic Surveys were analyzed. Statistically significant associations were found between lifetime MDD and being African American and being Afro-Caribbean (χ2 = 3.8, p = 0.05), but not with being Jamaican (χ2 = 5.01, p = 0.29). Logistic regression showed no statistically significant association between lifetime MDD and PED (Wald χ2 = 0.02, p = 0.89) and no effect modification by gender. There were no statistically significant associations between MDD and microaggression due to ethnicity (Wald χ2 = 0.00, p = 0.99), gender (Wald χ2 = 2.87, p = 0.90), race (Wald χ2 = 0.38, p = 0.53), age (Wald χ2 = 0.00, p = 0.99), and weight (Wald χ2 = 0.00, p = 1.00), compared to the unspecified microaggression category as baseline, among the Jamaican diaspora in the United States. Although no evidence was found of an association between PED and MDD among the Jamaican diaspora in the United States, the study findings may inform the development of evidence-based interventions to reduce population health disparities.

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