Validation and psychometric properties of the German Capability for Suicide Questionnaire

(In)stability of Capability for Suicide in Psychiatric Inpatients: Longitudinal Assessment Using Ecological Momentary Assessments

“…Moreover, the daily assessments referred to the past day (instead of the particular moment) and were based on one‐item measures which might have confounded the results and potentially might have limited the reliability of the assessments. Yet, validity of the EMA items was supported by correlations with respective subscales of the GCSQ (Wachtel et al., ), corroborating the validity of the EMA results. In general, the operationalization of CS requires further work (Chu et al., ; Klonsky et al., ).…”

“…Every evening at 8:00 p.m., participants were prompted a signal and asked to rate their level of CS referring to the past day on a 5‐point scale from “1” (do not agree at all) to “5” (fully agree) that were rescaled for analysis to 0–4 with three items capturing pain tolerance, fearlessness about death, and perceived CS. All items were selected from two German measures of CS (Spangenberg et al., ; Wachtel et al., ) and reformulated to capture variability in the construct. All EMA items were presented in German (see Table for CS item wordings).…”

“…We focus on both facets of CS (i.e., pain tolerance and fearlessness about death). Because several studies have shown the high utility of assessing the subjective, self‐rated perception of being able to die by suicide with one item (i.e., perceived capability for suicide) (Rimkeviciene, Hawgood, O'Gorman, & de Leo, ; Wachtel et al., ), we further included perceived CS in our assessment.…”

“…Consequently, CS is considered to consist of two facets, fearlessness about death and pain tolerance (Joiner, 2005). Individual differences in CS are assumed to result from different experiences made across the life span such as combat exposure (Bryan, Hernandez, Allison, & Clemans, 2013), history of suicide attempts (Van Orden, Witte, Gordon, Bender, & Joiner, 2008), or childhood maltreatment (Liu et al, 2017).…”

Life experiences and the acquired capability for suicide in incarcerated men

“…Additionally, Smith, Wolford-Clevenger, et al (2013) found that the ACSS was, in a separate study of the current sample of incarcerated men, comprised of three interpretable factors: General Fearlessness and Pain Tolerance, Death Specific Fearlessness, and Spectator Enjoyment of Violence. Further still, other researchers have developed additional items, scales, and alternative models of the ACS and its components (Klonsky & May, 2015; Wachtel, Siegmann, et al, 2014; Wachtel, Vocks, et al, 2014). We examined three versions of the ACSS: the original 20-item ACSS, the 7-item Fearlessness about Death scale, and the three-factor scale identified by Smith, Wolford-Clevenger, et al (2013).…”