Individual and neighborhood determinants of depressive symptoms in ethnic minorities in the urban HELIUS sample: a multi-level network perspective

Ethnic minorities in Europe experience an increased risk of depressive symptomatology. This is believed to be the result of the interplay between different factors at the individual (e.g., psychological, socioeconomic, cultural) and the neighborhood level (e.g., social cohesion, resources, ethnic diversity). This study sheds light on the interplay between variables using cross-sectional data from 13,507 individuals from five ethnic minority groups from the Healthy Life in Urban Setting (HELIUS) study in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We developed a novel multilevel network analysis to explore the conditional associations between factors of interest for the entire group, and deviations from these effects for each ethnic subgroup. Across all groups, unemployment, perceived stress, and adverse experiences were most strongly connected to depressive symptoms, while other individual factors such as perceived ethnic discrimination were connected indirectly. While individual psychological factors remain the strongest predictors of depressive symptomatology, socio-demographic and cultural determinants underly these psychological factors.