Premium
National Suicide Rates a Century after Durkheim: Do We Know Enough to Estimate Error?
Author(s) -
Claassen Cynthia A.,
Yip Paul S.,
Corcoran Paul,
Bossarte Robert M.,
Lawrence Bruce A.,
Currier Glenn W.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
suicide and life‐threatening behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.544
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1943-278X
pISSN - 0363-0234
DOI - 10.1521/suli.2010.40.3.193
Subject(s) - suicide rates , poison control , suicide prevention , concatenation (mathematics) , injury prevention , human factors and ergonomics , estimation , metric (unit) , data collection , population , fidelity , psychology , occupational safety and health , statistics , medical emergency , demography , medicine , computer science , engineering , environmental health , sociology , mathematics , operations management , telecommunications , systems engineering , pathology , combinatorics
Durkheim's nineteenth‐century analysis of national suicide rates dismissed prior concerns about mortality data fidelity. Over the intervening century, however, evidence documenting various types of error in suicide data has only mounted, and surprising levels of such error continue to be routinely uncovered. Yet the annual suicide rate remains the most widely used population‐level suicide metric today. After reviewing the unique sources of bias incurred during stages of suicide data collection and concatenation, we propose a model designed to uniformly estimate error in future studies. A standardized method of error estimation uniformly applied to mortality data could produce data capable of promoting high quality analyses of cross‐national research questions.