Research report“Impulsive” youth suicide attempters are not necessarily all that impulsive☆
Section snippets
Sample
Data from the national school-based Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) were used for this study (years 1993–2003). These data are part of the public domain and are available on the internet for use by researchers (National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2006). The YRBS is one component of an epidemiologic study called the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS). It was established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assess and monitor
Main analyses
Results were consistent with expectations; the groups significantly differed with regard to the selected impulsivity items (F (20, 23,304) = 37.88, p < 0.001). The effect size for this omnibus tests and all other tests were calculated using the procedure outlined by Olejnik and Algina (2000). The ω2 value was 0.53, which can be considered a large effect. Planned contrasts on the first canonical variate revealed that each group was significantly different from one another. The correlations between
Discussion
The purpose of the current study was to pit two competing views against one another. If impulsivity's involvement in suicide attempts relates to “spur of the moment” behavior, our group who attempted but did not plan a suicide attempt should be at least as impulsive as the group that planned and attempted. If, on the other hand, the mechanism through which impulsive people are at high suicide risk is through their exposure to repeated painful and provocative experiences, the group that showed
Role of funding source
This research was supported, in part, by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to Tracy K. Witte and Thomas Joiner (1 F31 MH077386-01). The NIMH had no further role in the study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.
Conflict of interest
The authors of this manuscript have no conflict of interest in the publication of this manuscript.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion for making their data publicly available for sue by researchers.
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This paper was presented in November 2005 at the 39th Annual Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy Convention in Washington, D.C.
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