The Prevalence of Major Depressive Episode, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Substance Dependence among Urban American Fathers: Evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study

Marilyn Sinkewicz, University of Wisconsin at Madison

This paper constructs a profile of the mental health conditions of a population sample of urban American fathers. The study participants are men in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. The results indicate that the prevalence of major depression among these men is substantially higher compared to results from other national studies. Beyond the substantive findings, one of the most important contributions of this paper concerns the investigation of participant non-response. Multiple imputation (MI) strategies are used to impute missing values. MI is a principled imputation technique that produces improved estimates and confidence intervals that properly reflect the uncertainty of the missing data. MI also has the advantage of retaining the full sample size, which is critical for fine-grained analyses across sub-groups. These findings suggest that studies that do not account for non-response bias may produce conservative estimates of psychopathology among men, especially poor men and men of color.