Abstract: The older, female, unmarried and rural individuals often are viewed as populations at high risk for depressive symptoms because of age stereotype, gender stereotype, physiological factors and the lack of resource. Most scholars in depressive symptoms agree that there was higher proportion and level of depressive symptoms in these special populations. In order to add further understanding about these populations, this study tends to examine the depressive symptoms of employees at career transitions. Career transitions as a stressor often induces higher stress that may trigger higher level depressive symptoms for everyone. In other words, due to the stress experience, the older, female, unmarried and rural individuals may be more able to adapt the transition in career and have lower depressive symptoms than other people. We therefore aim to explore whether the older, female, unmarried and rural populations permanently have severe depressive symptoms after career transitions by change score modeling. The present study investigated the effect of career transitions, including self-employed event and off-duty event, on the change of depressive symptoms, and the moderating effect of age, gender, marital experience and urban-rural. Using the longitudinal data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS; 2010, 2012 and 2014), we tracked participants before and after their career transitions and record changes in their depressive symptoms scores by Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (KPDS) and Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). A total of 19,696 participants finished three-wave depressive symptoms questionnaires (47.63% males and 52.37% female; 8.11% unmarried and 91.89% had married; 44.29% living in urban and 55.71% living in rural; aged from 16 to 91 years, average age 46.22 ± 14.61). There were 745 participants who had a transition from work to the self-employed and 524 participants who departed from work between 2010 and 2012 among these participants. In addition, the effect of career transitions and demographic variables was tested for Mplus 8.3 and the results were showed by path coefficient. The results showed that high level of depressive symptoms brought out an intra-individual decline in subsequent depressive symptoms and the career transitions played an important role in the intra-individual changes in depressive symptoms. Specially, the self-employed event predicted the intra-individual declines in depressive symptoms and the off-duty was opponent. What’s more, the demographic variables had direct effect and moderating effect on the intra-individual changes in depressive symptoms. The findings of direct effect showed the positive association between age and the intra-individual changes in depressive symptoms, and the negative association between gender, marital experience, urban-rural and the intra-individual changes in depressive symptoms. The moderating effect revealed that when becoming the self-employed the older and rural individuals had intra-individual declines in depressive symptoms; whereas, the older and male employees as experiencing off-duty event had intra-individual increases in depressive symptoms. Findings show the older, female and rural individuals as special populations at a high risk for depressive symptoms have intra-individual decreases in depressive symptoms after career transitions. These results give support to our viewpoints that some special populations are not always in high depressive symptoms. Future research could find other risk factors of depressive symptoms to add further understanding of the depressive symptoms of older, female and rural employees. And the findings have broadened implications for theoretical perspectives on psychological health of employees.

摘要： 为探索成为自雇佣者与离开工作岗位后，高龄、女性、未婚与农村员工4类抑郁症状高风险群体抑郁症状增量变化。借助计分模型，使用2010~2014年CFPS数据分析两事件与抑郁症状增量的关系，检验年龄、性别、婚姻经历与生活所在地的调节作用。结果表明，一般员工成为自雇佣者后抑郁症状增量下降，离开工作岗位后抑郁症状增量增加；细化至高风险群体，高龄与农村员工成为自雇佣者后，女性员工离开工作岗位后，抑郁症状增量下降。表明职业转换后，常见抑郁症状高风险群体抑郁症状恶化趋势能够减缓。