The Study on the Effect of Owning Pets, Dogs or Cats, On the Rates of Stress and Depression in Thailand

Abstract

Several studies have reported that pets can help people decrease their stress and depression. This encourages people to own either cats or dogs to help their mental health. This research aims to find the effectiveness of pets owning on the rate of stress and depression between petting dogs and cats. This research may help people who struggle with mental health. If this research confirms that dogs and cats have an impact on stress and depression, this may help people decide whether to own dogs or cats. On the other hand, if owning dogs or cats doesn’t have a correlation, people may need to see other ways or may discuss other factors that would come after buying a cat such as time, price, and pet’s behavior. Thus, we conducted a survey consisting of 33 questions. We had 26 pilot responders, revealing 0.819 for pet owners and 0.899 for non-pet owners. Our results from one-way ANOVA (F-test) show no correlation between dog owners, cat owners, and non-pet owners for their stress and depression rates (p-value = 0.333). This suggests that owning pets is not the main factor that could help people to step away from stress and depression.