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

虽然大量的研究已经记录了自杀风险的社会人口学趋势，但关于人们如何经历自杀以及他们如何将这些经历框定在他们的身份上的一个更根本的问题仍然没有答案。该项目将研究自杀幸存者如何构建文化叙事，使他们的自杀经历的意义，以告知自杀预防策略，临床方法与自杀人群，自杀后的社会支持。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的文化叙述中的这种变化。对自杀行为的社会机制的识别将有助于政策制定者：1）通过了解幸存者自杀经历前的独特环境来制定和完善自杀预防措施; 2）通过识别自杀经历后的独特环境和需求来制定政策，帮助有自杀经历的人重新回归生活和社会; 3）通过解释自杀人群中不同社会身份的差异来完善临床医生对自杀人群的方法。如果，如证据所示，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定制自杀预防政策和自杀后规划，这既可以挽救生命，又可以改善幸存者的生活质量自杀后的经验。 了解人们如何经历自杀幸存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的半结构化访谈，本项目将研究个人的社会身份以及这些身份的突出性如何影响他们对自杀经历的理解，以及这些框架如何与他们在自杀意念或自杀企图后的过渡期有关。访谈数据将使用Max QDA的扎根理论方法进行分析，Max QDA是一种允许对叙事访谈数据进行排序、编码和组织的软件程序。鉴于对自杀的定性研究很少，这个项目在方法论和理论上都是新颖的。定性的方法将推进当代社会学理论的自杀，并提供有关社会机制的信息，通过社会类别与自杀经验。更广泛地说，该项目有助于社会学理论有关的健康差距，不同的社会地位。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

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.