Analysis On Psychosocial Factors Of Undergraduates' Attitude To Suicide

Suicide has been an important question in study of health psychology in recent years. There are about one million persons died from suicide each year in the world, and suicide attempters is at least 10 times as many as those who actually take suicide. From last century on, the rate of suicide among youngsters worldwide has been increasing, which becomes the urgent task to be solved in prevention of suicide. The result of investigation by WHO shows that suicide is one of three major leading causes of adolescents' death, and ranks the first cause of death among people aged 15-34 in China. Undergraduates' suicide is the most serious problem, the rate of which is 2-4 times as great as age-mate and higher than the young men who are not university students. Furthermore, such a rate is still going up year after year. As the talent of youngsters, university students' suicides will bring about great loss to the development of science and economic construction of our nation. Researchers in many countries have found that undergraduates' attitudes to suicide play an active role in occurrence of intention and behavior for suicide, so through the study of undergraduates' suicide attitude, its construction and related factors will be found, which is significant to take an effective way in suicide prevention among undergraduates.This paper, from the psychological point of view, attempts to discover the psychosocial factors of undergraduates' suicide attitude through the survey of students' understanding of suicide, and attitudes of persons who commit suicide, as well as their family and euthanasia, so as to set up a campus suicide prevention system, and essentially reduce the undergraduates' suicide by changing their negative cognition of suicide. Previous study has shown that the negative association of suicide attitude with suicide ideation is significant, and suicide ideation was greatly influenced by personality, self-concept, social support, rearing style of parents, life events, depression, anxiety, and so on. So it was expected that attitude toward suicide would also be influenced directly or indirectly by these similar psychosocial variables.Based on the hypothesis and objective above, this study employed the questionnaire method and use the Suicide Attitude Questionnaire, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, Tennessee Self-concept Scale, Social Support Questionnaire, EgmaMinnen av Bardndosnauppforstran, Adolescent Self-Rating life Events Check List, Self-Rating Depression Scale and Self-Rating Anxiety Scale surveyed 419 number of undergraduates aged 16-24 in Xi'an. From the result of statistical analysis, some conclusions we draw are as follows:First, most undergraduates take neutral attitude to suicidal behavior and person who commit suicide, while they sympathize the family dependent and agree with euthanasia. Undergraduates' suicide attitudes have no significant difference in sex, grade, major, region, only children, family income, parents' condition, and so on.Second, grades of study influence the attitude to suicide, students with low grades tend to approve suicide more than high scale student.Third, there are wide correlations among personality, self-concept, social support, rearing style of parents, depression, anxiety and suicide attitude, except daily events, in particular is the closest relation of self-concept to suicide attitude.Fourth, regression analysis reveals that formation of suicide attitude is influenced by several factors both directly or indirectly. It is the result of interaction between personality, self-concept, social support, rearing style of parents, depression and anxiety, of which personality and social support exert direct effect on suicide attitude, while personality, rearing style of parents, depression and anxiety influence suicide attitude through self-concept and social support.