The first finding that must be noted is that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected for any of the hypotheses; no significant relationships were found between depression and extraversion, between depression and gender, or extraversion and gender.

Furhter points of discussion are as follows:

Key Findings
Additional Findings
General Conclusion

Key Findings

Hypothesis 1
In compete contrast to the initial hypothesis, that there would be a difference in the proportion of extraverts and introverts in the depressed and control groups, the results of this study indicated that there was no difference at all; the proportion of depressed individuals to control in both the extravert and introvert conditions was .29. A chi squared analysis showed that p was .947 and there was no significant relationship between depression and extraversion.

Hypothesis 2
The second hypothesis, that there would be a relationship between depression and gender, was also not supported. Although there was a slightly higher proportion of depressed males than females (.30 and .28, respectively), this difference was found not to be significant when a chi squared test was carried out (p = .852). Consequently, the null hypothesis could not be rejected.

Hypothesis 3
The third hypothesis, that there would be a relationship between extraversion and gender, was also not supported. While the proportion of introversion was higher in males than females (.48 and .31, respectively), when a chi squared test was carried out, this difference was found not to be significant (p = .212). However, it should be noted that this difference was the largest found in the study overall.

Additional Findings

The levels of depression in introverts and extraverts
In addition to the data relating to the main hypotheses of the study, a number of other interesting results were uncovered. The first of these refers to the difference between the mean depression score of the extravert and introvert groups. While the proportion of depressed individuals in both groups is the same, the mean scores of the two groups are quite different; One possible reason for the difference observed in the mean level of depression for the two groups is the extremely high standard deviation on the depression scores, particularly for the extravert group. It is also possible that outliers in the data could have contributed to this difference.

The proprotion of depressed/non-depressed and extraverts/introverts in the sample
As expected, there were more extraverts than introverts in the sample (.38 and .62, respectively), as is the case with the general population (The Center for Applications of Psychological Type, 2005). However, there was a higher than expected proportion of depressed individuals in the overall sample; .29 of the sample were depressed, a far higher proportion than expected, considering the Irish national figure for depression is closer to .07 than .029 (Aware, 2005).

The proportion of depression in males and females
Finally, a slight difference was observed between the proportion of depressed individuals in males and females. Contrary to the figures reported by Aware (2005) of an almost 2:1 female to male ratio, there was a slightly higher proportion of depressed males than females. Again, this may have been due to the sample size and small locality from which the sample was drawn, but the sheer variation from the expected figures is enough to merit further investigation.

General Conclusion

The results produced by this study are specific to Irish third-level college students, and focus almost exclusively on the relationship between depression and extraversion. However, if the results of this study are accurate, there is no relationship to speak of. Is this true only of Irish college students? Can the results be generalized to the Irish population in general, or even beyond that? This study goes some of the way to addressing the question of the possibility of the potential relationship between extraversion and depression, but only further research will tell if these results are specific only to the sampled population, or can be generalized to the population at large.