Doctoral Dissertation Research: Suicide Survival Narratives: How Social Statuses Affect Survivors' Cultural Narratives about Suicide Experiences

博士论文研究：自杀生存叙事：社会地位如何影响幸存者关于自杀经历的文化叙事

• 批准号: 2001557
• 负责人: Mark Pachucki
• 金额: $ 1.6万
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts Amherst
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-04-15 至 2024-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2001557&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Suicide; Survival

While a great deal of research has documented sociodemographic trends in suicide risk, a more fundamental question about how people experience suicide and how they frame those experiences across their identities remains unanswered. This project will examine how suicide survivors construct cultural narratives to make meaning of their suicide experiences in order to inform suicide prevention strategies, clinical approaches to working with suicidal populations, and post-suicide social supports. We know that variation in social statuses, such as social class, gender and race, are related to increases in suicide risk. This project will analyze such variations in survivors’ cultural narratives. The identification of social mechanisms underlying suicidality will help policy makers: 1) create and refine suicide prevention by understanding the unique circumstances that precede survivors’ suicide experiences; 2) design policy to help those who have suicidal experiences transition back to life and society by identifying their unique circumstances and needs following suicide experiences; and 3) refine clinicians’ approaches to suicidal populations by explaining variation within the suicidal population across social identities. If, as evidence suggests, suicide survivors’ experiences and cultural narratives vary across social positions then these findings will have the potential to contribute to tailored suicide prevention policy and post-suicide programming, which could both save lives from suicide and improve survivors’ quality of life post-suicide experience. Understanding how people experience surviving suicide is critical to enhance suicide prevention efforts as well as to proving support to suicide survivors. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 120 suicide survivors, this project will examine how individuals’ social identities—and the salience of those identities—affect how they make sense of their suicide experiences and how these framings relate to their transitions back to life after periods of suicidal ideation or suicide attempt(s). Interview data will be analyzed using a grounded theory approach with Max QDA, a software program that allows for sorting, coding, and organizing narrative interview data. Given the paucity of qualitative work on suicide, this project is both methodologically and theoretically novel. The qualitative approach will advance contemporary sociological theory about suicide and provide information about the social mechanisms through which social categories relate to suicide experiences. More broadly the project contributes to sociological theories related to health disparities that vary by social status.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

尽管大量研究记录了自杀风险的社会人口趋势，但关于人们如何经历自杀以及他们如何在身份中构建这些经历的更基本问题仍未得到解答。该项目将研究自杀幸存者如何构建文化叙事来理解他们的自杀经历，以便为自杀预防策略、与自杀人群合作的临床方法以及自杀后社会支持提供信息。我们知道，社会阶层、性别和种族等社会地位的变化与自杀风险的增加有关。该项目将分析幸存者文化叙事中的此类差异。识别自杀背后的社会机制将有助于政策制定者：1）通过了解幸存者自杀经历之前的独特情况来制定和完善自杀预防措施； 2) 制定政策，通过确定自杀经历后的独特情况和需求，帮助有自杀经历的人回归生活和社会； 3）通过解释不同社会身份的自杀人群的差异，完善临床医生对自杀人群的治疗方法。正如证据表明的那样，如果自杀幸存者的经历和文化叙述因社会地位而异，那么这些发现将有可能有助于制定量身定制的自杀预防政策和自杀后规划，这既可以挽救自杀的生命，又可以改善幸存者自杀后的生活质量。 了解人们如何经历自杀幸存者对于加强自杀预防工作以及向自杀幸存者提供支持至关重要。通过对 120 名自杀幸存者进行深入、半结构化的访谈，该项目将研究个人的社会身份（以及这些身份的显着性）如何影响他们如何理解自己的自杀经历，以及这些框架如何与他们在自杀意念或自杀企图一段时间后恢复生活的转变相关。访谈数据将使用 Max QDA 的扎根理论方法进行分析，Max QDA 是一个软件程序，可以对叙事访谈数据进行排序、编码和组织。鉴于有关自杀的定性研究很少，该项目在方法论和理论上都是新颖的。定性方法将推进当代关于自杀的社会学理论，并提供有关社会类别与自杀经历相关的社会机制的信息。更广泛地说，该项目对与因社会地位而异的健康差异相关的社会学理论做出了贡献。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。