Citation

Spittal MJ, Gunnell D, Sinyor M, Clapperton A, Roberts L, Pirkis J, Niederkrotenthaler T. Crisis 2024; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, International Association for Suicide Prevention, Publisher Hogrefe Publishing)

DOI

10.1027/0227-5910/a000961

PMID

38770800

Abstract

Evaluations of interventions targeting the population level are an essential component of the policy development cycle. Pre-post designs are widespread in suicide prevention research but have several significant limitations. To inform future evaluations, our aim is to explore the three most frequently used approaches for assessing the association between population-level interventions or exposures and suicide - the pre-post design, the difference-in-difference design, and Poisson regression approaches. The pre-post design and the difference-in-difference design will only produce unbiased estimates of an association if there are no underlying time trends in the data and there is no additional confounding from other sources. Poisson regression approaches with covariates for time can control for underlying time trends as well as the effects of other confounding factors. Our recommendation is that the default position should be to model the effects of population-level interventions or exposures using regression methods that account for time effects. The other designs should be seen as fall-back positions when insufficient data are available to use methods that control for time effects.

Language: en

Keywords

difference-in-difference design; interrupted time series analysis; policy evaluation; pre–post design; time series analysis