Intervention Research with Youths at Elevated Risk for Suicide: Meeting the Ethical and Regulatory Challenges of Informed Consent and Assent

Intervention research with youths at elevated risk for suicidal behavior and suicide—a vulnerable and high risk population—presents investigators with numerous ethical challenges. This report specifically addresses those challenges involving the informed consent and assent process with parents/guardians and youths. The challenges are delineated in the context of pertinent laws and regulatory requirements, and guidelines are suggested for their practical resolution. These are illustrated with case examples from NIMH‐funded intervention trials. Through the sharing of such methodological information, intervention researchers can support each other in conducting ethical research in a manner that does not unduly compromise scientific rigor.     

The Comorbidity of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Suicidality in Vietnam Veterans

Vietnam veterans (N = 232) recruited from three sources were assessed for suicidal thinking and behaviors, and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. Findings support the notion that suicidal thoughts are prevalent in this group, with veterans in psychotherapy reporting a greater likelihood of such symptoms (82.6%) than veterans in the community (35.7%) or those seeking assistance through a veteran's outreach center (66.7%). Thoughts of ending one's life and a previous suicide attempt were significantly correlated with a diagnosis of PTSD (r = .53, p < .001; and r = .33, p < .001, respectively). Veterans with a diagnosis of PTSD and depression or dysthymia were also more likely to report suicidal thinking and behaviors than veterans with only one of the diagnoses.     

Brief report: Relativism and identity crisis in young adulthood

This study investigated the relationship between epistemological world views and identity formation. Forty college students, aged 17 to 23 years, were presented with a paradigm belief scale (Social Paradigm Belief Inventory; SPBI), an identity status questionnaire, and an indepth interview about a conflict they had recently experienced. It was hypothesized that a relativistic world view would be related to a moratorium identity status because relativistic thought processes involve a questioning of the objectivity of knowledge and authority structures and hence an awareness of the variety of alternative and potentially conflicting roles and choices. Results indicated that relativism was the most common world view used when responding to questions about a personal conflict and that relativistic scores on the SPBI were predictive of the moratorium status. Relativistic scores on the SPBI were also negatively related to identity achievement, as were mechanistic scores. Females experienced moratorium to a greater extent than males but were not more relativistic. Results are discussed in terms of linkages among cognitive development, psychosocial development, gender, and the type of measures used to assess world view status.     

Assessing the Validity of Data Synthesis Methods to Estimate Religious Populations

The present study tests the validity of a data synthesis approach to population estimates of religiously defined groups. This is particularly important in places like the United States, where there is no definitive source of official data on its population's religious composition, and researchers must rely on costly, large‐scale surveys, or congregational membership studies. Each approach has limitations, especially for estimation of small religious groups and for estimation within small geographic areas. Without official statistics, the degree of bias in estimates is unknown. Data synthesis, specifically Bayesian multilevel estimation with poststratification, offers a useful alternative that maximizes the utility of data across all sources to estimate multiple groups from the same sources of data. This method also facilitates comparison of groups. This study provides evidence of the validity of the approach by synthesizing data from Canada, a country that includes questions about religious identification in its national census.     

Promoting teachers’ agency: reflective practice as transformative disposition

Reflective practice has been criticised for having become a standardised method in teacher education and on-the-job training, oftentimes following routines that more likely turn out to be self-affirming than to actually foster change. Also, reflective practice is still widely understood as an individual process. Both aspects are considered problematic and are addressed by employing an activity-theoretical approach that is suggested to be essentially compatible with an existentialist perspective on reflective practice as offered by Thompson and Pascal. Utilising the theory of expansive learning, formative interventionist methodology is proposed to provide a robust framework for developing collaborative and critical reflective practice, which in turn reveals the transformative potential of teachers’ agency, as illustrated by a study accompanying and supporting the development of an Austrian secondary school.     

The role of maladaptive anger in self-criticism: A quasi-experimental study on emotional processes

The present study examines the role of emotion in the self-critical process of individuals with anger problems. Self-criticism is a prevalent intra-personal feature which greatly impacts an individual’s emotion. So far, it is unclear, which emotions individuals with maladaptive anger experience when they work through their self-criticism. Using a quasi-experimental design, the present study compared n = 23 anger-prone under-graduate students to n = 22 controls on process indices of contempt, fear, shame, anger and global distress, as well as on their access to underlying need, as participants were working through personalized self-critical content. This was achieved using a single-session enactment from emotion-focused therapy, augmented with a standardized procedure for priming participants to focus on their unmet needs. Findings suggested that this work on self-criticism reduced for both groups distress, fear and shame, as well as increased assertive anger (McNemar tests significant at p = .05). More centrally, anger-prone individuals expressed more self-contempt (t(1, 44) = 3.65; p < .05), and they had more difficulty in accessing their underlying need (χ² = 5.35; p < .05), when compared to controls. These results have implications for clinical work with anger-prone individuals, and clarify key features in the use of enactment interventions when working towards emotional resolution. The present study also demonstrates the use of personalized stimuli in the context of clinically relevant quasi-experimental research on emotional processes.