COMPARING GENUINE AND SIMULATED SUICIDE NOTES - A NEW PERSPECTIVE - COMMENT

The recent article by Stephen T. Black (1993) comparing genuine suicid e notes with simulated notes is examined here. This article corrected a sampling error made in the original study by E.S. Shneidman and N. F arberow (1957), but Black's design suffers from theoretical and method ological problems that render it uninterpretable: First, no theoretica l background is elaborated, and no hypotheses are offered. Second, no constructs are operationalized, and no predictions are tested. In the present article, the operational design is critiqued, and then it is s uggested that the study of suicide notes in this fashion should cease.