Assessment of suicidal intention: The Scale for Suicide Ideation.

TLDR

The study aims to develop and validate a 19‑item Scale for Suicide Ideation (SSI) to quantify suicidal intention. The authors created the SSI, a 19‑item clinical instrument, and performed validation studies to assess its reliability and validity. The SSI demonstrated high internal consistency, moderate correlations with clinical risk ratings, sensitivity to changes in depression and hopelessness, construct validity across independent studies, and factor analysis revealed three factors: active desire, specific plans, and passive desire.

Abstract

This article describes the rationale, development, and validation of the Scale for Suicide Ideation (SSI), a 19-item clinical research instrument designed to quantify and assess suicidal intention. The scale was found to have high internal consistency and moderately high correlations with clinical ratings of suicidal risk and self-administered measures of self-harm. Furthermore, it was sensitive to changes in levels of depression and hopelessness over time. Its construct validity was supported by two studies by different investigators testing the relationship between hopelessness, depression, and suicidal ideation and by a study demonstrating a significant relationship between high level of suicidal ideation and dichotomous attitudes about life and related concepts on a semantic differential test. Factor analysis yielded three meaningful factors: active suicidal desire, specific plans for suicide, and passive suicidal desire.