Evaluating suicide prevention programs: What to measure?

thousand suicides occur in the U.S. each year. In 2005, suicide was the eighth-leading cause of death for men of all ages, the third leading cause of death for all 10- to 24-year-olds, and the second leading cause of death for 25- to 34-year-olds. In answer to the problem of suicide, numerous types of suicide prevention programs, treatments, and maintenance interventions (collectively referred to as “prevention programs”) have been developed and implemented. However, evaluating the effectiveness of these programs has been hampered by constraints to the measurement of outcomes. If the purpose of suicide prevention programs is to prevent suicide, then the most valid measure of the effectiveness of these programs is suicide deaths. However, because suicide is a low baseline event, suicide deaths may not be a reliable outcome for most suicide prevention programs. Therefore, program evaluators must choose less valid measures of program effectiveness, but do these outcomes lead to reductions in suicide risk? This presentation will address this “measurement conundrum” by (1) providing a typology of outcomes for suicide prevention programs, (2) identifying the logical, theoretical, and empirical support for outcomes commonly used in the evaluation of suicide prevention programs, (3) providing a checklist by which the relationship between program outputs, outcomes, and purpose may be assessed.