Abstract

This project was created in order to discover which grade and gender shows the most

symptoms of depression amongst high school students. The main questions are which grade

contains the most students that show symptoms of depression? In which gender are symptoms of

depression more common? The hypothesis is that symptoms aligned with depression are highest

upon 11th graders and that depression will be more prevalent in girls rather than boys. The first

step of testing was getting access to the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck Depression Inventory,

n.d.) and then editing it so the questions are more appropriate and fitting for high school

students. The new and edited tests were then handed out to five people per gender (males and

females) per grade, so forty students total. After completion, the tests were handed back and the

data was recorded. The 10th grade class was shown to have scored the highest on the tests

averaging 23.4, while the 11th graders averaged a 17.6 which does not support my hypothesis.

The girls outscored the boys in every single grade, so the total girls scored higher (averaging

22.55) compared to the total boys (averaging 17.65). The results make obvious that the 10th

grade class and females show the most symptoms of depression compared to the other grades

and males. There are many different factors that could have impacted why the results turned out

the way they did; life at home, amount of work at school, etc. However, the sample size for the

testing was possibly too small. Improvements to this test could be having a larger sample size.

This research is relevant to society because it shows how many high schoolers are experiencing

troubles with their mental health. Possibly in the future, the data collected from experiments like

this will motivate a change to schools to reduce the amount of work given so that students would

not suffer as much from symptoms of depression as present time.