Sociocultural Processes in Latina Suicide Attempts

描述（由申请人提供）：西班牙裔女性青少年的自杀企图率（五分之一）高于非西班牙裔女性青少年（十分之一），然而，人们对西班牙裔女性的自杀企图、她们的前因以及为什么西班牙裔女孩比其他女孩更有可能自杀知之甚少。虽然关于这一现象的原因的理论和临床公式已经出现在文献中，但这些想法还没有受到实证审查。拟议的项目将采用定性方法，辅以定量措施，使用包含生态发展系统理论的概念框架来检查这一现象。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Rates of suicide attempts among Hispanic adolescent females (one in five) are higher than for their non- Hispanic counterparts (one in ten), yet little is known about Hispanics' attempts, their antecedents, and why Hispanic girls are more likely than other girls to attempt suicide. Although theoretical and clinical formulations about the reasons for this phenomenon have appeared in the literature, these ideas have not been subjected to empirical scrutiny. Using qualitative methods supplemented by quantitative measures, the proposed project will examine the phenomenon using a conceptual framework that encompasses ecological-developmental systems theory. The study will (1) explore the phenomenology of the suicide attempts from the girls' perspective (e.g., antecedent distress, crisis events, subjective experience); (2) explore parents' understandings of their daughters' suicide attempts (including their hypotheses about preceding crisis events and daughters' motivations); and (3) examine the familial, developmental, and sociocultural experiences that distinguish adolescent Latina attempters and their parents from non-attempters and their parents. One hundred adolescent Latinas who have attempted suicide will be recruited to complete questionnaires. We will also interview parents to get multiple informant perspectives on the suicide attempts. To insure that the factors we explore and identify are indeed unique to attempters rather than simply representing aspects shared by most Hispanic girls and families, we will also interview a matched group of 100 Hispanic nonattempters and their parents. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews will be conducted to explore psychological, family and social experiences preceding suicide attempts; why the attempts become the chosen response; and how the attempts are understood or interpreted by the girls. Objective measures of the sociocultural and familial factors posited in the conceptual model will enrich the qualitative data. This emic, intra-ethnic approach can help explain why some Hispanic teenage girls attempt suicide and others do not, and shed light on the interaction of cultural factors with other factors believed to influence suicide attempts. Key research goals are to determine if, and how, the explanatory factors hypothesized in the literature play a role in the attempts, and to invite the emergence of factors not considered previously.