Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Availability

Open Access Thesis

Keywords

African American teenagers--Suicidal behavior--Risk assessment; Suicide--Risk factors--Testing; Academic theses;

Abstract

Suicide is the cause of death for nearly 30,000 deaths per year in the United States (Henkel, 2005). Studies show that rates of suicide have increased dramatically among African Americans ages 10-19 years, yet the overall suicide rate of African American adolescents is still lower than that of their Caucasian counterparts (Gould & Kramer, 2001 ; Greening & Stoppelbein, 2002). Some researchers have begun to study protective factors, particularly resilience, as one of the factors that should be maximized to reduce the rate of adolescent suicidal thoughts and behaviors. In particular, resiliency is an adaptive, stress-resistant personal quality that allows the individual to thrive despite a number of unfortunate life experiences (Markstrom, Marshall, & Tryon, 2000). Osman and colleagues (2004) developed the Suicide Resilience Inventory-25 (SRI-25), which is a self-report instrument that assesses protective factors in three domains: Internal Protective, External Protective, and Emotional Stability. The present study focused on the following issues: (a) examine the reliability estimates of the SRI-25 scales; (b) evaluate the ability of scale scores of the SRI-25 to differentiate the responses of two ethnic groups; (c) evaluate the ability of the SRI-25 scale scores to differentiate between the responses of Caucasian and African American girls; (d) examine the differences in item responses on each of the three scale scores of the SRI-25 between two ethnic groups; and (e) evaluate the ability of the individual items on the SRI-25 scales to differentiate between girls in both ethnic groups.

Year of Submission

2007

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Psychology

First Advisor

Seth Brown

Second Advisor

Mel Gonnerman

Third Advisor

Augustine Osman

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

2007

Object Description

1 PDF file (88 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

Included in

Psychology Commons

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