Are Certain Schools More Prone to Suicide Ideation?

• In Event: 14.046 - Poster Session 1
  In Poster Session: 14.046-6 - Contemporary Mental Health Issues Facing Students and Schools

Abstract

Suicide ideation (SI) increases dramatically from the age of 12-18, reaching a lifetime prevalence rate of more than 16%.
Despite the importance of school experiences for adolescents, only a few studies attempted to conceptualize and investigate relationships between school context characteristics and student suicide ideation.
Secondary analysis of California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) was conducted among 179,457 high school students from 790 schools and replicated two years later (860 schools with 216,587 students) with similar results. Multilevel analyses were conducted.
School-level SI’s ranged 4%- 67% mean 20.0% (SD 5.7) with ICC2 =.68, indicating meaningful differences in SI. SI is explained by student characteristics (R2 = .20), and by school-level attributes (R2 = .55). No meaningful cross level interactions were identified.

Authors

• Ron Avi Astor, University of Southern California

• Rami Benbenishty, Bar-Ilan University