This twenty-one item instrument will be used to assess the overall depressive symptoms of the survey participants and other psychological factors that stem from depression such as self-dislike, lack of sex drive, and feelings of guilt or worthlessness. Hatzenbuehler, Parpal, and Matthews (1983) reported in their study that used the Beck Depression Inventory that the reliability coefficient for their sampled subjects was .83 on the same day and .60 at a one week interval. Also, in concerns to validity, the Beck Depression is one of the most known and utilized self-report measures used for the clinical diagnosis of depression in America and around the world. The second survey instrument to be utilized is a measure of demographics. A list of demographic information to be collected is as follows: gender, age, family structure, spirituality, and academic standing. Demographic information on gender, age, family structure, spirituality, and academic standing will be collected in this last section of the questionnaire (this is the brief statement). The last section of the questionnaire will collect demographic information such as gender, age, family structure, spirituality/religion, and academic standing. Participants will have the option to choose “male”, “female”, or “I do not wish to …show more content…
The two groups involved will be students whose biological parents have never separated or divorced and students whose biological parents have separated and divorced. There will only be a single test for each participant in this study. The researcher plans to collect demographic information on variables such as gender, age, family structure, spirituality/religion, and academic standing. Also to be included will be the scores of participants on the Beck Depression Inventory taken within the survey. The participants’ responses given on the family structure portion of the demographic survey will determine to which group they belong. Mean scores will be calculated for ratio or interval variables such as age, questions regarding age on family structure questions (age at the time of divorce), academic standing questions (GPA and tardy/absence number and/or frequency), and scores on the Beck Depression Inventory. In order to compare means of these ratio data and find signficant differences among these groups, independent samples t-tests will be utilized. Also, in order to examine differences among groups concerning nominal variables (e.g. differences in religious/spiritual preference between the two groups), Chi-square tests for indepedence will be