Beliefs about the causes of depression.

This thesis consists of three papers: a literature review, an empirical paper and a reflective account. The literature review was conducted to examine the associations between causal beliefs in depression and preferences for and attitudes towards different interventions. Ten papers were included which all used clinical samples. Papers were critiqued for quality, and findings suggest that belief in the biological model is associated with a preference for and more favourable attitudes towards biological interventions such as medication. The association between causal beliefs and preferences for different psychological interventions is less clear, but findings suggest that people prefer therapeutic modalities that ‘match’ their causal beliefs.
The empirical paper investigated predictors of self-stigma and prognostic pessimism in 184 people experiencing depression. It was hypothesised that depression severity, self-efficacy and biological causal beliefs would be significant predictors in a regression analysis. However, only depression severity and self-efficacy predicted self-stigma, and there were no significant predictors found of prognostic pessimism. The data for prognostic pessimism violated normality. Due to this violation and because the sample was mainly White British women, generalisability of findings is limited.
The last paper contains the authors reflections on the research process, with research decisions outlined and critiqued, including topic choice, participants, data collection and measure choice. It focuses not only on the difficulties but also the positive aspects of the research process. Reflections are considered in relation to the authors epistemological position, and to the more over-arching issues that arise when conducting research in clinical psychology.