Left-handers are more likely to be depressed

Kevin Denny writes:

Depressive symptoms are significantly higher amongst left-handed men. While 19% of right handed men report experiencing depressive symptoms for at least a two week period, the figure for left handed men is almost 25%. For women the corresponding percentages are 33% and 36% respectively but the difference is not statistically significant.

The analysis is of “a new large population survey from twelve European countries,” a random sample of 27000 non-institutionalized people aged 50 and older. Handedness was classified based on self-reporting, and depression is measured using standard questions. Of the sample, about 7% of men and 6% of women were classified as left-handed.

My only suggestion (beyond reporting fewer significant digits in the tables) is to rescale the depression scale by dividing by two standard deviations; this would allow the coefficients to be interpretable on the same scale as those for the binary outcome (see Table 2).

1 thought on “Left-handers are more likely to be depressed

  1. Thanks for the suggestion although I am not convinced that would be much of an improvement. Some folk will be interested in the scale itself.

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