The association between suicide tendency and economic wellness indicators
Margherita Zamponi, Milan, Italy
Introduction:
Various studies have been made to understand how cultural factors have influences on a country suicide rate.
While there is a deep and ascertained connection betweeen suicite tendencies, social pressure and psychiatric disorders, fewer studies have been made to understand the relation between economic wellness and suicide rate among countries.
Wellness is a difficult concept to abstract and it's not identified only by income per person. The purpose of this study is to understand if income per person and employ rate can help to identify a good/poor level of wellness under the economic point of view and if and how this indicators are associated to suicide rates.
Methodology
Samples:
Data set includes measures from 78 countries . The data have been collected from various sources.
Mesurement:
Suicideper100TH refers to 2005 data about Suicide per 100 000 when Mortality is due to self-inflicted injury. (Data are from a combination of time series: WHO Violence and Injury Prevention (VIP), WHO Global Burden of Disease). Income per person refers to 2010 Gross Domestic Product per capita in constant 2000 US$. The inflation but not the differences in the cost of living between countries has been taken into account. (World Bank Work Development Indicators). Employ rate is about total employees (Percentage of total population) age above 15 years, that has been employed during the given year. (International Labour Organization)
I do believe that there is the possibility to identify economic causes that are connected to the suicidal tendencies in population.
So the questions we want to answer are: * Is the suicide tendency of population relatable to income level? * Does the employ rate helps to identify an indicator of economic stability that is associable to suicide rate?
Results:
The first part of the study consisted in an analysis of the distribution of the dependent variable.
We can recognize a right skewed-right distribution, that means the major part of countries are concentrated on low level interval of suicide rate.
While the first results suggested that there is no sensible correlation between this three variables (no statistical significance), this study dig further to see if a combination between income per person and employ rate may results in an identifiably pattern.
The Income per person and employ rate data have been reduced from continuous to categorical variables. Employ rate is divided into two groups, countries below and over the average employ rate. For income per person the groups are four and are equally divided with similar amount of records in each one.
Unfortunately there is no positive conclusion. It has been used the ANOVA method, but no group or subgroup gave any evidence of a recognizable pattern.
Discussion:
Even if the conclusions of this study are to refuse the hypothesis that there is an association between suicide rate and some economic aspects, this is just a limited gaze on an very broad field. I must add that many countries refuse to give the exact amount of suicides, or may not consider failed attempts while other does. The database was initially about 195 different countries, but since records with missing values have been deleted, the resulting data was only about 78 nations, mostly due to absence of suicide rate information. Studies in this fields have been really complicated since there are huge difficulties to obtain valid data.