Testing multi-disciplinary theories of suicide using a cross-cultural database

在其最基本的层面上，文化人类学试图解释不同文化之间的相似和差异。其中一种方法是将个别人类学家的人种学案例编码成数据集，用于对假设进行统计检验。这项提议在一项关于自杀的跨文化研究中采用了这种方法。在世界范围内，自杀造成的死亡人数超过了所有战争和凶杀案的总和。自杀未遂通常会造成严重伤害，据估计，年轻人的自杀未遂人数是自杀未遂人数的100-200倍。绝大多数关于自杀的研究都是在范围狭窄的社会中进行的，主要是在欧洲及其前殖民地的民族国家，使用的研究设计几乎没有提供关于个人自杀案件的社会和文化背景的信息。因此，目前对大多数人类社会中的自杀现象缺乏详细了解的情况下，自杀的理论和治疗方法都得到了发展。鉴于美国日益增长的文化和种族多样性，以及不同文化背景的人之间更频繁的在线互动，了解跨文化动机和自杀原因对公共健康是有益的。该项目将使用代表广泛的人类文化多样性的245个社会的人种学数据来调查自杀。关于自杀的跨文化数据将从人类关系领域档案(HRaf)中获得，该文件包含超过100万页的人种学报告，跨越数百个世纪，涉及数百种不同的文化。人类学、临床心理学和进化生物学关于自杀行为的关键理论将与hRaf中关于自杀的人种学描述进行验证。这些理论将包括：一组与自杀相关的人类学解释，它们在一定程度上将自杀视为相对无能为力的个人反击与之冲突的强大他人的一种手段；临床心理学的领先理论模型，强调逃避痛苦、给他人带来负担、解决问题的缺陷和情绪失调；以及进化生物学的理论，将自杀视为代价高昂的需求信号。此外，自杀的描述将被综合在元民族志中，提供关于自杀的全面人类学观点，这将补充其他学科的观点。

At its most fundamental level cultural anthropology seeks to explain the similarities and differences between cultures. One approach to this is the coding of ethnographic cases from individual anthropologists into data sets that can be used to conduct statistical tests of hypotheses. This proposal takes this approach in a cross-cultural study of suicide. Worldwide, suicide accounts for more deaths than all wars and homicides combined. Attempted suicides, which among young adults are estimated to outnumber completions by a factor of 100-200, often cause serious injury. The vast majority of research on suicidality has been conducted in a narrow range of societies, primarily the nation states of Europe and its former colonies, using study designs that provide little information on the social and cultural contexts of individual suicide cases. Hence, theories of, and treatments for, suicidality are currently developed with little detailed knowledge of the phenomenon in the majority of human societies. Given increasing cultural and ethnic diversity in the U.S. and more frequent online interaction between people of different cultural backgrounds, understanding the cross-cultural motivations and causes of suicide is a benefit to public health.This project will investigate suicide using ethnographic data from 245 societies representing a broad range of human cultural diversity. Cross-cultural data on suicide will be obtained from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), which contain over a million pages of ethnographic reports, spanning several centuries, on hundreds of different cultures.Key theories of suicidal behavior from anthropology, clinical psychology, and evolutionary biology will be tested against ethnographic accounts of suicide in the HRAF. The theories will include: a group of related anthropological explanations for suicide which see it, in part, as a means for relatively powerless individuals to strike back at powerful others with whom they are in conflict; leading theoretical models from clinical psychology, which emphasize escape from pain, burdensomeness on others, problem solving deficits, and emotional dysregulation; and a theory from evolutionary biology that views suicide as a costly signal of need. In addition, the accounts of suicide will be synthesized in a meta-ethnography, providing a comprehensive anthropological view of suicide that will complement perspectives from other disciplines.