Citation

Claassen CA, Yip PS, Corcoran P, Bossarte RM, Lawrence BA, Currier GW. Suicide Life Threat. Behav. 2010; 40(3): 193-223.

Affiliation

VISN 2 Center of Excellence for Suicide Prevention, US Veterans Administration, Canandaigua, NY 14472, USA. Cindy.Claassen@va.gov

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, American Association of Suicidology, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1521/suli.2010.40.3.193

PMID

20560743

Abstract

Durkheim's nineteenth-century analysis of national suicide rates dismissed prior concerns about mortality data fidelity. Over the intervening century, however, evidence documenting various types of error in suicide data has only mounted, and surprising levels of such error continue to be routinely uncovered. Yet the annual suicide rate remains the most widely used population-level suicide metric today. After reviewing the unique sources of bias incurred during stages of suicide data collection and concatenation, we propose a model designed to uniformly estimate error in future studies. A standardized method of error estimation uniformly applied to mortality data could produce data capable of promoting high quality analyses of cross-national research questions.

Language: en