A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Ruminative Thinking Öffentlichkeit
Rinaldi, Katerina (Fall 2021)
Abstract
Depression is a common and debilitating diagnosis that is more prevalent in women than in men. The 2:1 ratio of women to men with depression has been consistently replicated, leading to a large body of research into why women are especially vulnerable. Possible reasons for this sex difference include a variety of biological and social risk factors, but one of the most commonly cited explanations is that women ruminate more than men. This idea, called “Response Styles Theory” was proposed in the 1980s, and is still used to justify research into “hard-wired” biological sex differences. Here, I conducted a meta-analysis of 41 studies that included adult men and women’s scores on the Ruminative Response Scale, in order to examine whether this sex difference is large enough to make a substantial contribution to the 2:1 ratio. A pooled effect size of sex on rumination was calculated using the “metafor” package in R. The result was a small effect size, d= 0.25, that is not likely to contribute meaningfully to the sex difference in depression prevalence. In 290 of the excluded studies, the reason the authors did not report means separately for both men and women was that they tested for a sex difference, found none, and then pooled the sexes. Therefore, the effect size is almost certainly smaller. This study provides evidence that both popular and scholarly literature over-emphasize a variable that is unlikely to be clinically meaningful. Researchers should explore more clinically relevant explanations for the 2:1 ratio, like stigma of depression in men.
Table of Contents
Introduction..................................................1
Methods........................................................6
Results..........................................................7
Discussion.....................................................8
References....................................................14
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