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Abstract
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INTRODUCTION: Conceptualizing suicide and suicide prevention processes in terms of goal-directed systems as actions, projects and careers we address subjective, manifest and social processes (Michel and Valach, 2001; Valach et al., 2002). To work within these perspectives we employ systematic observation in studying manifest actions (Valach et al., 2002), self-confrontation interview for obtaining information on ongoing subjective processes (Valach et al., 2002) and naïve observation to collect data on social meaning of the target processes. Working within a constructionist paradigm we base our propositions on a comprehensive analysis containing all the three methods. This presentation adds some insights from naïve observation to our studies on suicide and suicide prevention.
METHODS: Thirty-three young people (mean age = 27.3; SD = 6.5) viewed an interview of 24 min duration in which a psychotherapist inquired about suicide processes of a female patient 8 days after her suicide attempt. The observers answered a number of questions after each time segment (6 min), then assessed the interview as a whole and also supplied some information about them.
RESULTS: The observers were able to assess the alliance of the patient and the psychotherapist in a similar way as the patient did. However, they underestimated the patient's feeling of obtaining some new understanding in the interview and overestimated the extent of patient's belief that the interview was helping her that she felt better after the interview and, particularly, that she was able to see that she will eventually work out her problems. Studying the prediction power of attributed emotion for the observers' attribution of patient's belief that the psychotherapist will help her to reach her goals we found that being in need of support, feeling agitated, restricted, energetic, nervous, sad, dissatisfied, hurt, careful and embarrassed was unrelated to the goal attribution. However, the attribution of joy, feeling understood, showing trust, feeling content and confident predicted well the attribution of patient's belief that the psychotherapist will help her to reach her goals.
DISCUSSION: As suicide and suicide attempts are socially embedded processes it is important to understand the social meaning and attribution processes in everyday life of the patients that they often feel misunderstood which inhibits the suicide prevention process (Michel et al. in press).
Language: en |