Describing Suicidality: An Investigation of Qualitative SSF Responses

David A. Jobes · Kathryn N. Nelson · Erin M. Peterson · Daniel Pentiuc · Vanessa Downing · Kristen Francini

70 citations0/0 files storedSuicide and Life-Threatening Behavior

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Suicide and Self-Harm Studies Psychological Testing and Assessment Mental Health via Writing

Abstract

Given the incidence and seriousness of suicidality in clinical practice, the need for new and better ways to assess suicide risk is clear. While there are many published assessment instruments in the literature, survey data suggest that these measure are not widely used. One possible explanation is that current quantitatively developed assessment instruments may fail to capture something essential about the suicidal patient's experience. The current exploratory study examined a range of open ended qualitative written responses made by suicidal outpatients to five assessment prompts from the Suicide Status Form (SSF)--psychological pain, press, perturbation, hopelessness, and self-hate. Two different samples of suicidal outpatients seeking treatment, including suicidal college students (n = 119) and active duty U.S. Air Force personnel (n = 33), provided a wide range of written responses to the five SSF prompts. A qualitative coding manual was developed through a step-by-step methodology; two naive coders were trained to use the coding system and were able to sort all the patients' written responses into the content categories with very high interrater reliability (Kappa > .80). Certain written qualitative responses of the patients were more frequent than others, both within and across the five SSF constructs. Among a range of specific exploratory findings, one general finding was that two thirds of the 636 obtained written responses could be reliably categorized under four major content headings: relational (22%), role responsibilities (20%), self (15%), and unpleasant internal states (10%). Theoretical, research, and clinical implications of the methodology and data are discussed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 70 citations exist upstream.

References

1997A Guide to Conducting Consensual Qualitative Research 1990Suicide as escape from self.1939Explorations in Personality 2000Risk factors for suicide in psychiatric outpatients: A 20-year prospective study.1990Relationship between hopelessness and ultimate suicide: a replication with psychiatric outpatients 1983Reasons for staying alive when you are thinking of killing yourself: The Reasons for Living Inventory.1993Psychiatric Risk Factors for Adolescent Suicide: A Case-Control Study 1997Psychometric characteristics of the Scale for Suicide Ideation with psychiatric outpatients

Cited by

2011A cross-sectional investigation of the suicidal spectrum: typologies of suicidality based on ambivalence about living and dying

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.