Paper Title :Suicide Ratesin OECD Countries: Reevaluating Relationship With Socio-Economic Factors, And Social Media

Author :Susie Han, Jd Han

Article Citation :Susie Han ,Jd Han , (2016 ) " Suicide Ratesin OECD Countries: Reevaluating Relationship With Socio-Economic Factors, And Social Media " , International Journal of Management and Applied Science (IJMAS) , pp. 45-49, Volume-2,Issue-4

Abstract : This paper examines the relationship between suicide in OECD countries and socio-economic variables. The inflation rate as an economic stressor has the predicted relationship with suicide rates. Surprisingly, unemployment rate and GDP per capita did not have a significant effect on suicide rate, which is in line with existing works indicating that economic factors do not have a consistent impact on suicide rates. GDP per capita may have yielded no significant effects due to a “Humped-U” trend; meaning economic pressure may be highest for medium-level income countries while lower for poor or rich countries. Thus, there may be no consistent relationship between income level and suicide rates. Nevertheless, GDP per capita growth rate was significant throughout the model for both total and gender-specific suicide rate. An increase in GDP growth rate leads to a higher suicide rate in fast-growing countries, including particularly when GDP per capita is relatively low to moderate. On the other hand, for a group of countries with a high GDP per capita, a high growth rate does not seem to add economic pressure or to increase suicide rate. In contrast to rather mixed performances of economic variables, the variables related to social aspects have superior explanatory powers Theurbanization index yielded a relatively large positive coefficient, suggesting thata weakening of social support network significantly increases suicide rate. Another interesting result is the negative coefficient of mobile cellular subscriptions, which suggests technology has provided positive outlets for people to interact as a community and thus provoked positive impacts on suicidal behavior. These two variables suggest the importance of social supports, which may warrant further careful attention for suicide prevention. Keywords— Suicide; Socio-Economic Factors; Urbanization; Social Media; Suicide Prevention.

Type : Research paper

Published : Volume-2,Issue-4

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