The Impact of Childhood and Adult Educational Attainment and Economic Status on Later Depressive Symptoms and Its Intergenerational Effect

This study aimed to investigate a process accounting for the socioeconomic inequality in depressive symptoms from generation to generation. To examine the process, this study utilized data from three generations of grandparents, mothers, and daughters. This study employed data from the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families, collected from a large-scale national representative sample in South Korea. Conducting pathway analysis, the study tested direct and indirect pathways between mother’s socioeconomic status (SES) experienced in childhood and their offspring’s depressive symptoms through maternal SES and depressive symptoms in adulthood. This study found that early economic hardship increased the risk of depressive symptoms in daughters through maternal low education and depressive symptoms (β = 0.03, p < 0.05), which was consistent with the theoretical framework, which relied on a life-course model highlighting that early life experiences affect later adult health and can potentially have effects across generations. This finding suggests that interventions that work with maternal education and depression may benefit from efforts to break the likelihood of continuity of depressive symptoms into the next generation, especially for their own daughters.