Theses and Dissertations Collection

Suicide is the intention of harming oneself to cause death. Idaho is amongst the states with growing rates of suicide deaths and suicide is a major public health issue. Most studies conducted on suicide have investigated suicide rates at state levels but not small areas such as counties or demographic groups. This study was conducted to develop a reliable model to characterize suicide at the county level.

\par Relative risk of suicide for all counties in Idaho were obtained using Poisson hierarchical Bayes model and the performance was compared to standardized mortality ratio estimates. Relative risk estimates obtained using Poisson hierarchical Bayes had low standard errors compared to the relative risk estimates obtained using standardized mortality ratio. These estimates allowed us to observe that age adjusted relative risk of suicide was consistently above that of the state of Idaho in Custer, Lemhi, Shoshone and Nez Perce. Also, Madison was the only county with age adjusted relative risk of suicide consistently below the state of Idaho over the time period.

\par County level suicide risk factors such as unemployment, education and social connectivity could be incorporated into the model to predict relative risk of suicide. Local government and public health experts could use predictions from the model to target suicide preventive measures.