Timing of housing crises: Impacts on maternal depression

ABSTRACTHousing problems threaten maternal mental health, but the nature of the relationship between housing and depression across time is not fully understood. Drawing upon the literatures of household shocks and depressive illness, the present study leveraged longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study to probe the relationship between a housing-related crisis and depression among at-risk mothers (N = 2,503). Binary logistic regression tested whether a housing crisis predicted an episode of depression across up to one-, three-, and seven-year time lags. The sample was then balanced on key predictors of housing crises using greedy matching with propensity scores; regression models were replicated on the new matched samples. Results showed a housing crisis significantly elevated risk for depression within one year, but effects were attenuated across three and seven years; findings were consistent in the matched samples. Implications include the need to develop new conceptualizat...