Heitz, Frederick P.A. (2022) Tackling Depression by Finding Purpose in Life. Master thesis, Psychology.
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A thesis is an aptitude test for students. The approval of the thesis is proof that the student has sufficient research and reporting skills to graduate but does not guarantee the quality of the research and the results of the research as such, and the thesis is therefore not necessarily suitable to be used as an academic source to refer to. If you would like to know more about the research discussed in this thesis and any publications based on it, to which you could refer, please contact the supervisor mentioned.
Abstract
As purpose, a subcomponent of meaning in life, is connected to depression, we wanted to investigate the effect of a short, online purpose intervention on depression. Following this, we investigated when comparing different time points one week apart, after receiving a purpose intervention, students will have reduced depression scores compared to students who did not receive an intervention. Psychology university students were randomly assigned to either a purpose intervention condition or a no-intervention control condition. For our main analysis, we conducted a repeated measures ANOVA (N = 74), where we investigated depression scores over two time points for the two conditions (purpose: N = 16; control: N = 58). As the intervention did not work in all persons, the main analysis was only executed on persons who benefitted from the intervention. Results from the analysis imply that the purpose intervention was effective in further decreasing depression scores (F = 10.83; p = .002) among students with a medium to large effect size (ηp² = .131) in comparison to the control condition (MD = -4.39; d = -.39). This study has strengthened the connection between purpose and depression as well as shown, that purpose has the potential to be used as a short-term intervention to improve depression. It also highlights the importance of using intervention research in non-clinical, young adult populations with experimental designs.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Master) |
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| Supervisor name: | Seidel, L.J. |
| Degree programme: | Psychology |
| Differentiation route: | Clinical Psychology (CP) [Master Psychology] |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Jun 2022 07:48 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Jun 2022 07:48 |
| URI: | http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/574 |
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