IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nas/journl/v117y2020p26170-26175.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Among deaths of despair, the individual and community correlates of US suicides have been consistently identified and are well known. However, the suicide rate has been stubbornly unyielding to reduction efforts, promoting calls for novel research directions. Linking levels of influence has been proposed in theory but blocked by data limitations in the United States. Guided by theories on the importance of connectedness and responding to unique data challenges of low base rates, geographical dispersion, and appropriate comparison groups, we attempt a harmonization of the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) to match individual and county–level risks. We theorize cross-level sociodemographic homogeneity between individuals and communities, which we refer to as “social similarity” or “sameness,” focusing on whether having like-others in the community moderates individual suicide risks. While analyses from this new Multilevel Suicide Data for the United States (MSD-US) replicate several individual and contextual findings, considering sameness changes usual understandings of risk in two critical ways. First, high individual risk for suicide among those who are younger, not US born, widowed or married, unemployed, or have physical disabilities is cut substantially with greater sameness. Second, this moderating pattern flips for Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Asians, and Hispanics, as well as among native-born and unmarried individuals, where low individual suicide risk increases significantly with greater social similarity. Results mark the joint influence of social structure and culture, deliver unique insights on the complexity of connectedness in suicide, and offer considerations for policy and practice

Author

Listed:
  • Bernice A. Pescosolido

    (Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; Indiana University Network Science Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405)

  • Byungkyu Lee

    (Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; Indiana University Network Science Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405)

  • Karen Kafadar

    (Department of Statistics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4135)

Abstract

No abstract is available for this item.

Suggested Citation

  • Bernice A. Pescosolido & Byungkyu Lee & Karen Kafadar, 2020. "Among deaths of despair, the individual and community correlates of US suicides have been consistently identified and are well known. However, the suicide rate has been stubbornly unyielding to reduct," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 117(42), pages 26170-26175, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:117:y:2020:p:26170-26175
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/117/42/26170.full
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:117:y:2020:p:26170-26175. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Eric Cain (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.pnas.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.