Suicide risk assessment in a college student population

A group of 211 students at a midwestern university completed the Suicidal B ehaviors Questionnaire (M. M. Linehan & S. L. Nielsen, 1981), Adult Suicida l Ideation Questionnaire (W. M. Reynolds, 1991a), Multi-Attitude Suicide Te ndency Scale (I. Orbach et al., 1991), Beck Helplessness Scale (A. T. Beck, A. Weissman, D. Lester, & L. Trexler, 1974), and the Reasons for Living In ventory (M. M. Linehan, L. J. Goodstein, S. L. Nielsen, & J. A. Chiles, 198 3) to determine if this group of commonly used self-report measures can dis tinguish between individuals with high and low levels of suicidal ideation and history of self-harmful behaviors. Exploratory principal-axis factor an alysis resulted in an interpretable 2-factor solution accounting for 36.2% of the variance in suicidality. Support for convergent validity of the chos en measures was also found. It appears that rapid, accurate assessment of u niversity student suicide risk is possible. Implications for reduction of s uicide risk in this segment of the population are discussed.