The Relationship Between Seriously Considering, Planning, and Attempting Suicide in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey

Abstract

The assumed ordinal relationship between seriously considering, planning, and attempting suicide in the 1999 Youth Risk Behavior Survey was examined by constructing a trajectory that identified all possible response patterns among the four questions measuring suicidal activity. Statistical analysis tested for differences in frequency of risk behaviors across levels of the trajectory. Overall, the trajectory provided insight to the progression of adolescent suicidal activity and demonstrated usefulness as a measure of suicidal intent. Significant differences between means of dependent variables at each level of the normative trajectory supported the hypothesis that frequency of risk behaviors increases monotonically with successive suicidal thought and behavior.

Associations Between Suicidal High School Students’ Help-Seeking and Their Attitudes and Perceptions of Social Environment

“…Consistent with Guttman properties of the YRBS (Perez 2005), among students who reported a suicide attempt, 116/136 (85.2 %) also reported suicidal ideation.…”

“…Although not the focus of the present study, participants also responded to the YRBS suicide attempt item, “During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?” Developed for population-based assessments, the YRBS suicide measure consists of four items that assess suicide ideation, suicide plan, suicide attempt, and suicide attempt with injury. These items form a Guttman scale (Perez 2005), with suicide ideation the most inclusive item. Responses to the suicide ideation item have been reported individually in epidemiological studies (Brener et al 2000; Eaton et al 2008) and other empirical studies (Eaton et al 2005; Swahn and Bossarte 2007).…”

Adolescent Alcohol Use, Suicidal Ideation, and Suicide Attempts

“…In a recent study using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, there was evidence of both inaccurate responders, whose inaccuracies were most likely the result of carelessness or confusion (2.4% of respondents), and ''jokester'' responders, whose inaccuracies were most likely the result of ''intentional mischief'' (about .6% of respondents) [27]. These results suggest that some of the suicide attempters in our study who did not report ideation, and thus did not report the typical progression of ideation, planning, and attempt [28] may have responded to these questions erroneously.…”

“Signs of Suicide” Shows Promise as a Middle School Suicide Prevention Program

“…The predictors in Equation varied slightly for the three categories of outcomes: (1) suicidal behavior at posttest (suicide attempt, planning, and ideation), (2) knowledge and attitudes, and (3) help‐seeking behavior. For models predicting suicidal outcomes, S 1 included two variables: (1) a dummy variable indicating pretest suicidal ideation, because it is considered the first stage in the process toward planned suicide (Perez, ); and (2) a dummy variable indicating pretest report of lifetime suicide attempt. Because a history of one or more suicide attempts has been identified as the most robust predictor of future suicidal behavior (Joiner et al., ), it was considered to be the best indicator for high suicide risk in our data.…”