These results indicate that the measurement of depression might be subject to the way a person is asked about mental health symptoms. The priming intervention seems to have served as a reminder about their history of adverse incidents and made them salient for those who had a history. This reminder then caused CES-D scores to increase among those who experienced an adverse event, and, in particular, a personal shock. On the other hand, people who experienced conflicts were not affected by priming. This suggests that these severe events are salient enough that they are always on respondents’ minds whether primed or not.

There are a few pathways in which the priming experiment could have impacted the respondents’ CES-D scores. As discussed previously, we expect that priming could have made the stimulus of conflicts, shocks, and deaths more accessible to the respondents, thus impacting their state of mind. In this case, the policy implications are such that both the experience of adverse events, and the act of remembering them, are shown to have a relationship with mental health.

It is also possible that measurement error was reduced through priming. By making the adverse effects visible to both the enumerator and respondent, there may have been less of a need for social desirability (e.g. some respondents could more honestly report depressive symptoms because of their past) (Tourangeau and Yan 2007).

On the other hand, having the CES-D questions come later in the survey – i.e., being primed – could alternatively increase measurement error due in part to survey fatigue (Egleston, Miller et al. 2011, Van de Walle and Van Ryzin 2011). To examine the internal reliability of the module we compare the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the set of CES-D questions between the two groups – priming and non – and find that it is marginally higher for the primed respondents (e.g. those who answered this module later in the survey).<sup>17</sup> In general, the priming results point to careful consideration when designing future surveys to capture depressive sypmtoms using the CES-D. Careful consideration is required of any potential priming quesitons prior to the CES-D.

Spillover effect of adverse events Neighbors’ experiences with deaths, shocks, and conflicts could also have an impact on one’s depression measure. This could be due to a variety of factors: via neighbors’ mental health outcomes spilling over into individual mental health, correlation of covariate adverse events and consequent lack of mutual insurance (Fowler & Christakis, 2008; Ray, 1998).

We evaluate the spillover effect of neighbors’ experiences on CES-D scores. In particular, we examine the effect of the percentage of neighbors who experienced negative events on one’s depressive symptoms (while controlling for personal and household experiences).

First, we evaluate the effect of percentage of neighboring households affected by any type of adversity on one’s own likelihood of being over the cutoff (Table 3 Panel A). We find that there

> 17 The overall reliability for the entire sample is 0.76; the Cronbach’s Alpha is .7699 for primed, and .7473 for nonprimed. The reliability can indicate how well the module measured depressive symptoms, but alternatively could indicate issues such as yay-saying.

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