Conducta suicida y adolescencia en contextos educativos

Resumen

Suicide is a major socio-heallh problem; in particular, completed suicide is !he second leading cause o! dealh among adolescenls and young adults worldwide. lts conceptual delimitatíon, etiology, assessment, prevention and intewention is still an unresolved issue today. In addition, suicida! behavior is associated with numerous personal, family, educational and socio-health consequences. The prevention of this phenomenon requires early idenlilicalion and detection to enable early inlewention, especially among young people. To dale, lhere is no lool in Spain designed and validaled specifically lor the adolescenl populalion, which explores !he differenl manilestalions of suicida! behavior. The design of new lools for this purpose lhat can be applied in educational contexts would allow to know the curren! status and design an individual and specilic intewention depending on !he behavior obsewed, within !he .range of suicida! behavior, in order to lry lo give a response lailored to !he personal needs detected and to intewene early. The aim ol lhis doctoral lhesis was to analyze suicida! behavior in adolescents lhrough the development and validation of a new assessmenl instrumenl called SENTIA and ils reduced version SENTIA-Breve and, on !he olher hand, to identily and validale risk subgroups of suicida! behavior through the methodology of laten! class analysis (LCA). The sample for !he first two SENTIA and SENTIA-Breve studies was 1790 adolescenls wilh a mean age ol 15.70 years (SD=1.26) and 45.6% of males. The second sample for !he LCA study was 1506 sludents, wilh a mean age of 16.5 years (SD=1.36) and 55.7% female. Both samples were selecled by stralified cluster sampling. The results showed !ha! both SENTIA and SENTIA-Breve presented adequate psychometric properties and could be used as tools for the detection of suicida! behavior in educational contexts. In addilion, SENTIA emerged as a useful measure for !he assessmenl of a general factor of suicida! behavior and three specific factors (Suicida! AcVPlanning, Communicalion and ldeation). On the other hand, between 4% and 15% of !he adolescents responded affirmalively in al leas! one item of !he scale; in lhis sense, girls scored higher !han boys and no significan! differences were found according to age in relation to suicida! behavior. In terms of socioemotional adjustment, !hose young people who scored higher on suicida! behavior also showed lower seores on self-esteem and prosocial behavior and higher seores on emotional problems. Finally, using !he LCA, four groups were identified in relalion to suicida! behavior with a differential profile in emotional and behavioral problems, subjective well-being, prosocial behavior, and positive and negalive affect. Comparatively, the high-risk group in suicida! behavior presentad worse socioemotional adjustment, conduct problems and lower seores in p·rosocial behavior. Suicídal behavior continues to be a growing problem, especially during youth, and requires new perspeclives and lools !ha! enable a beller approach to lhis phenomenon. This thesis aims to improve !he underslanding of suicida! behavior in adolescence and !he early detection of lhis phenomenon lhrough !he constructiºn of tools that allow !he screening of this population and !he idenlificalion of ditterent rou sal risk for suicida! behavior.