A brief screening tool for suicidal symptoms in adolescents and young adults in general health settings: reliability and validity data from the Australian National General Practice Youth Suicide Prevention Project
Section snippets
Participants
The study population consisted of 2851 consecutive patients, aged 15–24 years, who fully completed the suicide screening measure at clinics of 247 general practitioners in the Australian States of Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia. Gender distribution was 66% female; mean age was 19.6 years. Ninety one percent (91%) of 15–24 year old patients presenting during the period of the study agreed to participate. Most patients were born in Australia (90.1%) with 3.9% born in Europe, 2.4% in
Inter-item characteristics and internal consistency of the suicide screen
Table 1 displays the inter-item correlations of the four items from the DSI-SS suicide screen, as well as corrected item-total correlations. As can be seen there, all inter-item correlations were high, and all item-total correlations far exceeded the guidelines provided by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994) that an item be considered “weak” if it has a corrected item-total correlation <0.30. Accordingly, it is no surprise that coefficient alpha for the DSI-SS was quite acceptable (alpha=0.90). The
Discussion
We presented the suicidality subscale of the depressive symptom index (see Appendix A, as well as Metalsky & Joiner, 1997) as a brief screening tool for suicidality in young people in general health settings. Results regarding the measure, from approximately 2800 Australian adolescents and young adults, were favorable. Specifically, the scale was clearly unitary, cohesive, and internally consistent. Moreover, it evinced construct validity by relating to several demographic and clinical indices
Acknowledgments
This work was conducted under the auspices of the Psychiatry Department, Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, Perth, Australia. Funding for this project was provided by a grant from the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care, Mental Health Branch, as part of the National Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy.
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