A COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF DOMESTIC INSTITUTIONS ON SUICIDE IDEOLOGY

Research on domestic institutions and suicide ideology has been based on the United States. It is not clear if the results will replicate in other countries with a variety of institutional and cultural contexts . The present study addresses this gap in the literature through an an alysis of 17 nations. At the bivariate level, in 14/17 nations married persons are lower than nonmarried persons in their prosuicide attitud es; in 15/ 7 parents are lower than nonparents. A multivariate analysi s finds, however, that these relationships are attenuated when statist ical. controls are introduced into the analysis. A relationship betwee n married persons with children and low suicide ideology remains in 8/ 17 nations. While the relationship between domestic factors and suicid e ideology is replicated for the US, for most other nations the relati onship is spurious.