Citation

Fullerton CS, Ursano RJ, Liu X, McKibben JB, Wang L, Reissman DB. PLoS One 2015; 10(6): e0130863.

Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Public Library of Science)

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0130863

PMID

26125567

PMCID

PMC4488337

Abstract

There is a lack of research investigating community-level characteristics, such as community collective efficacy, mitigating the impact of disasters on psychological health, specifically depression. We examined the association of community collective efficacy with depressive symptom severity in Florida public health workers (n = 2249) exposed to the 2004 hurricane season using a multilevel approach. Cross-sectional anonymous questionnaires were distributed electronically to all Florida Department of Health (FDOH) personnel that assessed depressive symptom severity and collective efficacy nine months after the 2004 hurricane season. Analyses were conducted at the individual level and community level using zip codes. The majority of participants were female (81.9%), and ages ranged from 20 to 78 years (median = 49 years). The majority of participants (73.4%) were European American, 12.7% were African American, and 9.2% were Hispanic. Using multilevel analysis, our data indicate that higher community-level and individual-level collective efficacy were associated with significantly lower depressive symptom severity (b = -0.09 [95% CI: -0.13, -0.04] and b = -0.09 [95% CI: -0.12, -0.06], respectively) even after adjusting for individual sociodemographic variables, community socioeconomic characteristics, individual injury/damage, and community storm damage. Lower levels of depressive symptom severity were associated with communities with high collective efficacy. Our study highlights the possible importance of programs that enrich community collective efficacy for disaster communities.

Language: en