Methodological Strategies in Suicide a

This paper is concerned with methods employed in suicide research. Its purpose is to assess the contribution of various strategies in the search for understanding of suicide behavior and to recommend useful approaches for future research. While methodological strategies used in suicide research include the basic nonexperimental research designs of retrospective case-control studies and prospective studies, because suicide is recorded as a cause of death on the death certificate required by law, there is also the opportunity for ecological analyses across total populations, an option available for no other event of psychiatric interest except perhaps mental retardation so severe as to exempt children from school attendance. From death certificates come aggregate data such as national and regional suicide rates. Analytical approaches in the study of aggregate data include the classic epidemiological designs such as ecologic comparison studies, time trend analyses, and natural experiments. With the advent of modern computer technology, it becomes possible also to link suicide records to other official records and to use the demographic characteristics of suicides found on death certificates to look in more detail at their special characteristics.