Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ArticlesMultimethod Assessment of Suicidality in Adolescent Psychiatric Inpatients: Preliminary Results
Section snippets
Participants
Participants included 153 adolescents (54 boys, 99 girls) aged 12 to 17 years (mean = 14.8 years, SD = 1.6) who were admitted to an adolescent psychiatric inpatient unit in New England. The ethnic composition of the sample reflected hospital admission rates: 72.9% white, 10.4% Hispanic, 4.2% African American, and 12.5% mixed ethnicity/other. According to state census tract data, socioeconomic status levels for adolescents in this sample were high (15.6%), moderate (39.2%), low (17.6%), poverty
Rate of Suicidal Ideation and Behaviors by Assessment Instrument
Before examining the agreement between measures of suicidality, we examined the rate of suicidal ideation and behavior according to each measure in preliminary analyses. These data offer preliminary information on how conservative each of these measures is when screening for suicidality in adolescent inpatients. Table 1 lists the number and percentage of adolescents who were identified as exhibiting suicidal ideation and behavior according to each instrument for the entire sample, as well as
DISCUSSION
The accurate and efficient assessment of suicidal ideation and suicidal behavior is crucial for both clinical and scientific endeavors, yet there are currently few data available on the concordance between commonly used instruments designed to measure adolescent suicidality. This study provides initial empirical data on the agreement between measures of suicidal ideation and suicidal behavior in a sample of adolescent psychiatric inpatients, and it is the first to compare measures that use
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This work was supported in part by NIMH National Research Service Award F32-MH11770 to the first author. Special thanks to Dana Damiani and Joy Richmond for their assistance in data collection.