| |
Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
 | |
|
Is there a relationship between elderly suicide rates and educational attainment?
— a cross-national study | | Author(s) | Ajit Shah, Santanu Chatterjee |
| Journal title | Aging & Mental Health, vol 12, no 6, November 2008 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis, November 2008 |
| Pages | pp 795-799 |
| Source | http://www.tandfonline.com |
| Keywords | Suicide ; Death rate [statistics] ; Educational status [elderly] ; Correlation ; Cross national surveys. |
| Annotation | Suicides are associated with both high and low levels of intelligence and educational attainment. in both individual level and aggregate level studies, but this has been rarely studied in older people. A cross-national study examining the relationship between suicide rates (y axis) and educational attainment (x axis) in people aged 65+ was undertaken with the a priori hypothesis that the relationship would be curvilinear and follow a U-shaped curve with the quadratic equation Y=A+BX+CX², where A, B and C are constants. Data on suicide rates for both sexes in the age bands 65-74 and 75+ and the Education Index (a proxy measure of educational attainment) were ascertained from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN) websites, respectively. The main finding was the predicted curvilinear relationship between suicide rates in both sexes in both older age bands fitting quadratic equation Y=A+BX+CX². Given the cross-sectional study design, a causal relationship cannot be assumed. The impact of educational attainment on older suicide rates may occur through interactions with other factors, mediation of the effects of other factors, or by its effects being mediated by other factors, and require further study. |
| Accession Number | CPA-090402211 A |
| Classmark | EV: S5: F:V: 49: 3K |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
|
| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
| |
|