Of the total of 98 prisoners in this study, 22.4 % (22) were female. The mean age of the sample was 36.41 (with a standard deviation of 7.56). About half (52) of the prisoners were in medium-level security, about a quarter (28) in high-level security, and just under a fifth (18) in low-level security. 48% (47) were victims of violence within the prison.
Overall, 30 (30.6 %) of the 98 subjects were determined to be clinically depressed. At the bivariate level of analysis, the prevalence of depression was significantly higher for males (38.2 %) than females (4.5 %) (Fisher’s exact test, p = 0.002). The prevalence of depression was lower (16.7 %) in those detained in low-security environments compared to medium with the highest prevalence of depression (36.5 %), or high security (28.6 %) environments. However, this difference did not attain statistical significance (Likelihood ratio 22 = 2.7, p = 0.255). Prevalence of depression was significantly high (Fisher’s exact test, p = 0.001) for prisoners who had experienced violence during their detention. 96.1 percent of those not experiencing violence were determined to be clinically depressed compared with 40.4% of prisoners who had experienced violence (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.001).
Relative to females, the odds of depression in males was 0.1078 times higher. Relative to those with no experience of violence, the odds of depression were over 0.0926-fold higher among those who had experienced violence in the prison. Although the association was statistically significant, the confidence interval was wide, indicating imprecision in this estimate. Female prisoners were almost one and a half times more likely to be clinically depressed compared to male prisoners. In other words, female prisoners were more depressed than male prisoners. For each additional year of age, the level of depression was likely to increase by 1.05 times (Table 1).
References
Field, A. (2009). Discovering statistics using SPSS (3rd Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Polit, D. F. (2010). Statistics and data analysis for nursing research (Second Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
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