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

虽然大量研究已经记录了自杀风险的社会人口趋势，但一个更根本的问题--人们如何经历自杀，以及他们如何将这些经历与自己的身份联系在一起--仍然没有答案。这个项目将研究自杀幸存者如何构建文化叙事，使他们的自杀经历具有意义，以便为自杀预防战略、与自杀人群合作的临床方法以及自杀后的社会支持提供信息。我们知道，社会地位的变化，如社会阶层、性别和种族，与自杀风险的增加有关。这个项目将分析幸存者文化叙事中的这些变化。确定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，创建和完善自杀预防；2)制定政策，通过确定自杀经历后的独特情况和需求，帮助那些有自杀经历的人重返生活和社会；以及3)通过解释自杀人口中不同社会身份的差异，完善临床医生对自杀人口的方法。如果正如证据所表明的那样，自杀幸存者的经历和文化叙事在不同的社会职位上有所不同，那么这些发现将有可能有助于定制自杀预防政策和自杀后规划，这既可以拯救自杀生命，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证明对自杀幸存者的支持至关重要。通过对120名自杀幸存者进行深入、半结构化的访谈，这个项目将考察个人的社会身份--以及这些身份的突出程度--如何影响他们对自杀经历的理解，以及这些框架与他们在经历了一段时间的自杀意念或自杀未遂后回归生活的关系(S)。访谈数据将使用Max QDA的扎根理论方法进行分析，Max QDA是一种软件程序，允许对叙述性采访数据进行分类、编码和组织。考虑到关于自杀的定性研究的匮乏，这个项目在方法和理论上都是新颖的。定性方法将推动当代关于自杀的社会学理论，并提供关于社会类别与自杀经历相关的社会机制的信息。更广泛地说，该项目对与不同社会地位的健康差距有关的社会学理论做出了贡献。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.