Search

The CES-D is a screening instrument to measure depressive symptoms during the last week. It is useful and easy to use because no trained staff is needed to administer and score it. Interest in depression has been consistent in Mexico in recent years, and the CES-D is one of the most used scales. The goal of this paper is to present a bibliometric analysis of scientific papers reporting data obtained with the scale; the papers had to be published in a scientific journal with a reviewing board, a group of peer reviewers and be ISNN registered. Materials were found in EBSCOhost and Google Scholar databases. 80 papers were published between 1986 and 2011. An average of three papers was published every year . Most of the studies were developed in Mexico City and nationwide; there was a bi-national study, a multinational one, and four in several states combined. The journals with the highest number of papers were: SALUD MENTAL, Salud Pública de México, and Revista Mexicana de Psicología. There were 17 institutions involved in coordinating the studies; six of them were international. 41% of the studies were conducted with adolescents, 32% with women, and 90% in urban contexts. There are some areas which need further study to build a more comprehensive understanding about the distribution and characteristics of depressive symptoms and hence new studies must be designed to include understudied groups and populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing number of publications on the subject of burnout syndrome suggests this is the most widely researched psychological work-related outcome in the last decades. It is important to review the state of art in this phenomenon and to examine the challenging dimension that it has reached. The general objective of this paper was to carry out a systematic review of the published literature in order to characterize burnout research in Mexico. Methods A manual search was carried out in 1 2 databases including Spanish or Latin American journals. All the existent articles up to July 2012 were taken into account and five criteria were defined so as to assure the comparability among the studies. Meta-analyses were estimated with the averages of the burnout dimensions and the Cronbach alpha coefficients reported. Results Sixty-four studies were selected (n=1 3 801 employees); most of them were from health professionals and more than half were collected in Jalisco and Distrito Federal. The methodological analyses revealed that more than 90% of the studies were observational/cross-sectional designs, and most with data analyses that are vulnerable to the effect of confounding variables. A remarkable finding was the huge heterogeneity in the criteria used to determine the prevalence of burnout. The meta-analyses in 14 selected studies showed average burnout symptoms values of "once a month or less" within the frequency scale. Discussion The general balance of this review shows that the research on burnout in Mexico still has areas of opportunity. It is necessary to broaden the range of occupations and regions to improve the methodological designs and the information analyses, and to ensure the used scales have good psychometric properties. Some recommendations for future research are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term «eating behavior» is immediately related to food consumption. However, eating is a complex behavior mediated by external factors. Eating is not exclusively related to satisfying individual's needs or nutritional requirements. Eating behavior alteration has originated disordered eating (DE) and eating disorders (ED), such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating syndrome, where patterns of food ingestion are altered and people forget the importance of maintaining a balance between caloric ingestion and caloric expenditure, with repercussions in the nutritional status and in the individual's health. Recent studies carried out in Mexican population have confirmed the presence of DE, particularly among adolescents and young adults, and predominantly in females. Data from a representative sample of students with a mean age of 14.5 years reported an increase in the proportion of DE between the 1997 and the 2003 assessments (1.3% in males and 3.4% in females) compared to the 3.8% in males and 9.6% in females registered in 2003. More recent data from the National Nutrition and Health Survey 2006, in a representative sample of adolescents 10 to 19 years of age, indicated a prevalence of 0.8% (1% in females and 0.4% in males), with higher scores in the north and center-west areas of the country, followed by the central and south-south-east areas, with almost two-fold percentages in the urban settings compared to the rural ones. The multifactorial origin of ED is well known and among the most studied risk factors are: eating behaviors, high body mass index (BMI) and body thin-ideal internalization. Research findings indicate that overweight and obese adolescents are at more risk for body dissatisfaction, as their physical appearance is farther away from being as the one promoted by society and the media. The sociocultural pressure to be thin has promoted the internalization of the idea that being thin is synonymous to success, greater social acceptance, femininity (among females), self-control, and selfesteem. Based on the above, the main purpose of this paper was to evaluate the prevalence of DE and its relationship to body thin-ideal internalization and BMI in high school and college male and female students from an urban setting. An additional objective was to provide data on reliability and validity of the scales used in a sample of males, as well as additional validity data in females. Data analyzed in this research come from a larger study on risky factors associated to ED carried out in high-school and college students in the city of Pachuca, Hidalgo, during the 2007-2008 school years. After censing the school, a sample of 845 students was selected (381 males, 464 females), 45.1% was from high school, with a range of 15 to 17 years(X=15.82; D.E.=0.78), and 54.9% from college with a range of 18 to 23 years(X=19.81; D.E.=1.41) and that completed the questionnaires adequately.… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is a part of a broader research project aimed at adapting a brief intervention model to help families cope with substance abuse for its application to an indigenous population. Due to cultural differences between urban and indigenous contexts, the adaptation of psychological instruments to assess the intervention outcomes is a major need. Poortinga and Van de Vijver point out that transferring an instrument from the cultural group where it has been designed to another group is a common and economic practice; however, it can lead to invalid conclusions. For this reason, the adaptation must be pursued according to a thorough systematic process in order to develop reliable, understandable, and culture-sensitive instruments. Cognitive laboratories are among the different methods to evaluate instruments previous to its final application. Its main utility is to generate information about the quality of an instrument and about the way a single question is interpreted, accepted or rejected in different cultural groups. The objective of this article is to adapt the Coping Questionnaire (CQ), the Symptom Rating Test (SRT) and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) for its use in indigenous population through the cognitive laboratories method. The main interest is to develop instruments to assess psychological distress and how people cope with excessive drinking in the Mezquital Valley. To accomplish this objective, a two-phase study was carried out. Language adaptation for all three instruments was completed in phase 1, while the validation and identification of the psychometric properties of the new version took place during phase 2. The study was carried out in a community located in Municipio del Cardonal, Hidalgo, where around 60% of the population aged 5 or older speak an indigenous language, mainly Otomi also known as Ñahñu. The participants in phase 1 were 43 bilingual (Spanish-Ñahñu) women aged between 16 and 60 years, whose main activity was housekeeping. Women were contacted at community meetings, and they agreed to participate voluntarily once the objectives of the study were explained. They were also asked to authorize the recording of the interviews. The language adaptation was performed through the concurrent probing method of cognitive laboratory in its individual modality. Each one of the original items and answer options were read aloud as many times as needed. Immediately following the response, every participant was asked: What does this question mean?, Could you rephrase it?, How would you explain this question to another person in your community?. All comments were taken into account to rewrite each item. The instructions of all three questionnaires were also simplified to facilitate understanding. As a result of this procedure, the phrasing of 26 out of the 30 items of the CQ changed. The way the SRT questions were written was adjusted so that they could be used in an interview, which is why nearly all the items were modified. As for the CES-D, 9 items were modified, while 11 remained as in the original. Through this method, versions that were easier to understand were achieved, since commonly used terms among the population being studied were incorporated, which in turn reduced the time required to apply the three questionnaires. During the second phase, the researchers proceeded to validate the final version of the three instruments with a non-probabilistic study of 191 women who were contacted in the health center of the municipal head town; these were inhabitants of 30 of the 92 communities comprising the Municipio del Cardonal. All of them spoke Spanish, 65.8% were aged between 26 and 45 (X=35.2, SD=10.05), 29.5% had completed their primary school studies, while 26% had finished junior high school.… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence is recognized as a Public Health problem around the world. In the specific case of intimate Partner Abuse, which occurs at home, women are particularly vulnerable to be abused by their partners. In Mexico, as in other countries in Latin America, the systematic study of violence towards women is incipient. However, it is a highly predominant problem, which has a big impact on women's health, and represents a significant challenge to the Health System demanding health care due to intentional injuries. This paper analyzed information generated by the first National Survey of violence against women in 2003 (ENVIM, by his name in Spanish). The main objective is to identify the factors associated with the health services utilization by women, because of partner abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is aimed at exploring the relationship of some sociodemographic variables with the presence of depressive disorders among a low-income urban sample. Different variables have consistently been associated with such disorders, for instance, marital status, sex, and socio-economic status. As to marital status, some studies show that married people have better health conditions and feel more satisfied with their lives than their unmarried counterparts. Similarly, it has been found that widowed or divorced people present a number of psychological problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]