Attributions of school children and their relationship to depression

Hypothesized relationships between students' attributions for academic and social success and failure on two newly developed attribution scales were examined and compared to students' general attributions for success and failure on an established attribution scale, the Children's Attribution Style Questionnaire (CASQ). The newly developed scales were used to assess students' academic attributions (Student Academic Attribution Scale, SAAS) and social attributions (Student Social Attribution Scale, SSAS)The SAAS and SSAS were developed to allow students to rate success and failure due to internal causes, ability and effort, or external causes, chance and task difficulty, for typical school situations; also, optimism and pessimism global scales were calculatedBoth the SAAS and the SSAS and the CASQ were used to predict depression in 70 4th through 6th grade students using the Depression subscale of the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC).

Results support anticipated relationships between the SAAS and SSAS subscales and global scales of the CASQ subscales and global scales. For example, math success ability is positively correlated with all but one of the positive subscales of the CASQ (P <.05) as well as the overall attributional style of the CASQ (P<.01). When global scales from the SAAS, SSAS and the CASQ were evaluated for predictive capability, only the global scale from the SAAS and SSAS combined (Failure Internal, consisting of Failure Ability and Effort from both the SAAS and the SSAS) demonstrated the ability to predict the BASC Depression Scale to a significant degree (P <.05). Similarly, when global optimism and pessimism scales from the three instruments were compared for predictive utility, both Pessimism Failure Social (SSAS) and Pessimism Failure Academic (SAAS) predicted depression scores to a significant degree (P <.05), the Optimism-Pessimism global scales from the CASQ did not predict depression to a significant degree in this study.

The fact that the SAAS and SSAS subscales correlated significantly with the well- established, but more clinically oriented CASQ demonstrates the utility of the SAAS and the SSAS to assess attribution style with a general population from a school setting. The ability of the SAAS and SSAS global scores to predict significantly depressive symptoms in school children indicate a link between attributions and depression.