In a sample of 570 15- and 16-year-old normal high school students, the characteristics of those with and without a history of suicidal behavior were compared. In a written inquiry, information was obtained on family background, emotional and behavioral problems, sexual and physical abuse and suicidal thoughts and behavior. Differences between the students with and without a history of suicidal behavior were statistically analyzed for boys and girls separately by a matched control design. The results for both boys and girls indicated that the experience of sexual abuse, feelings of loneliness, depressed mood, low self-esteem and the use of drugs were particularly strongly related to suicidal thoughts and behavior; for girls, physical abuse and for boys, low self-reported academic achievement appeared to be clearly related aspects. Furthermore, the strong interrelations between all of these variables is underlined, suggesting a multi-problem background of youngsters with a history of suicidal behavior.
In a recent article in this journal (Fairchild, MacKinnon, Taborga & Taylor, 2009), a method was described for computing the variance accounted for by the direct effect and the indirect effect in mediation analysis. However, application of this method leads to counterintuitive results, most notably that in some situations in which the direct effect is much stronger than the indirect effect, the latter appears to explain much more variance than the former. The explanation for this is that the Fairchild et al. method handles the strong interdependence of the direct and indirect effect in a way that assigns all overlap variance to the indirect effect. Two approaches for handling this overlap are discussed, but none of them is without disadvantages.
The findings underscore the importance of further researching the role of cognition in the development, maintenance, and treatment of anxiety-based school refusal.
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