The situational and the personality factors predicting depression and anxiety of prisoners

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2003
Şenol, Emre
Prison environment is accepted as being stressful. Prolonged exposure of high level of stress leads to psychological and physical illness when it cannot be managed effectively. Beside stress, situational factors (type of prison, room type, crime type and penalty status) and personality characteristics (locus of control, hopelessness and suicide thinking) are reported to play crucial role in psychological disorders in literature. Most common psychological disorders in prison environment are known as depression and anxiety. The aims of the present study were exploring iiistressful life events in the prison environment, developing a valid and reliable instrument and examining predictive factors of depression and anxiety levels of prisoners. Totally, 190 prisoners from Ankara F Type Maximum-Security Prison and Ankara Closed Prison were included in the present study. Subjects are nonrandomly selected. In order to test hypothesis, hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used. According to results; as expected, situational factors could not predict the depression scores of the prisoners after removing the effect of control variables, personality characteristics and stress. Contrary to depression, situational factors could explain prisoners' anxiety scores after removing the predictive effect of control variables, stress and personality factors. When considering the situational factors explaining anxiety, the penalty status was the only variable that was able to predict the anxiety levels of the prisoners. The results were discussed in the frame of literature and the suggestions for future researches were handled.

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Citation Formats
E. Şenol, “The situational and the personality factors predicting depression and anxiety of prisoners ,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2003.