Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Critical Investigation of the Factors that Influence the Collection of Suicide Surveillance Data

自杀是增长最快、最不为人所知的死因之一。长期以来，关于自杀的科学文献一直被心理学和社会学领域所主导。虽然这样的见解很重要，但它们往往植根于狭隘的社会经济和文化生物医学框架，最近的研究表明，自杀的风险概况在不同的社会和文化群体中并不成立。这个项目培训一名研究生如何进行严谨的、有经验的科学田野调查，探索对自杀的文化理解如何影响旨在记录和研究这些死亡的过程。这项研究产生的数据对科学家来说很有价值，他们为医疗和执法官员提供建议，告诉他们如何解决自杀倾向和风险特征之间的差异。在亚利桑那州立大学Amber Wu tich博士的指导下，Ashley Hagaman探索了自杀是如何被感知、分类和记录的。这项研究将在尼泊尔进行，那里的社区报告推测自杀是育龄妇女的主要死亡原因。然而，国家层面的数据并不能证实这些发现。因此，自杀可能是一个比全国汇总数据显示的更大的问题。国家死亡率数据通过由社会、文化、法律和医疗机构形成的报告系统进行过滤。在尼泊尔收集的数据将在帮助理解自杀方面具有代表性意义；世界上60%以上的自杀发生在亚洲。这项研究试图了解在尼泊尔，从地方机构(即家庭、社区)到专业机构(即医疗、执法机构)，自杀是如何被感知、争论、分类和记录的。为了理清这些过程，本研究将调查以下问题：(1)是什么物质、社会和文化因素塑造了对尼泊尔自杀行为的理解？(2)代表家庭、社区、法律和医疗机构的行为者如何看待、竞争和谈判自杀文件？(3)是什么原因导致地方社区报告和更高级别的官方自杀报告中自杀数据的趋同或分歧？这项研究将包括对自杀定义、报告和执法、卫生和社区机构的文件的话语追踪。这些发现将推动人类学和其他社会科学理论的发展，这些理论与自杀、知识生产和当地生活经验的制度塑造有关。

Suicide is one of the fastest-growing and least-understood causes of death. The scientific literature on suicide has long been dominated by the fields of psychology and sociology. While such insights are important, they are often rooted in socioeconomically and culturally narrow biomedical frameworks, and recent research has revealed that the risk profiles for suicide do not hold true across different social and cultural groups. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, explores how cultural understandings of suicide shape the processes designed to record and study these deaths. The data generated by this research will be of value to scientists who advise medical and law enforcement officials about how to resolve disparities between suicide propensities and risk profiles. Ashley Hagaman, under the supervision of Dr. Amber Wutich of Arizona State University, explores how suicide is perceived, categorized and documented. This research will take place in Nepal, where community reports speculate suicide to be the leading cause of death for women of reproductive age. However, national-level data do not corroborate with these findings. Therefore, suicide may be a much greater problem than nationally aggregated data suggest. National mortality data are filtered through reporting systems shaped by social, cultural, legal, and medical institutions. Data collected in Nepal would be representationally significant in helping understand suicide; more than 60% of the world's suicides occur in Asia. This study seeks to understand how suicide is perceived, contested, categorized, and documented in institutions ranging from the local (i.e., family, community) to the professional (i.e., medical, law enforcement) in Nepal. To untangle these processes, this research will investigate the following questions: (1) What are the material, social, and cultural factors that shape the understanding of suicidal acts in Nepal? (2) How do actors representing familial, community, legal, and medical institutions perceive, contest, and negotiate suicide documentation? (3) What accounts for the convergence or divergence of suicide data in local-level community reports and higher-level official suicide reports? The research will include a discourse tracing of suicide definitions, reporting, and documentation in law enforcement, health, and community institutions. The findings will advance anthropological and other social scientific theories related to suicide, knowledge production, and the institutional shaping of local lived experiences.