The Association Between Depression And Poor Appetite Among African American Female Adolescents

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Langston Morrison

Langston Morrison is a senior student at Wesleyan University, working towards a Bachelor’s Degree in College of Letters, Economics, and International Relations. His research interests include language, African indigenous hermeneutics, philology, semiotics, epistemology, worldview(s), and James Africanus Beale Horton. After graduation, Morrison plans to work at a law firm before pursuing his ultimate dreams of going to law school in the Fall 2022. A passionate global citizen and international traveler, he is fluent in several languages and is studying to strengthen his proficiency in Arabic, German, and Kiswahili.

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Abstract: This study examines the relationship between depression and poor appetite among African American female adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States using the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (ADDHEALTH) from 1994-2008. The survey included 6,504 participants randomly sampled from around the United States. This study operationalizes “poor appetite” as a binary categorical response variable with “0” indicating that the respondent “never” had poor appetite in the past 12 months. The category “1” indicates that the respondent had experienced poor appetite “just a few times,” “about once a week,” “almost every day,” and “every day.” My explanatory variable “depression” is a scale from 0 to 3 based on respondents accordance (never or rarely – most of the time or all of the time) with the statement “you felt depressed.” Additionally, I wanted to include variables like race and sex to analyze whether or not there is a relationship to depression. My sex variable was invaluable in helping to explain the association between depression and poor appetite.

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