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Taking Action

Examine the Data

According to the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention, the first and most basic step in using the public health approach to suicide prevention is clearly defining the problem by collecting data and other information. This data will allow you to plan and implement a program appropriate for the problem in your community or for the target audience you serve. And it will help you evaluate and monitor your efforts to learn whether they are effective and how they might be improved. National and state level data on suicides and suicide attempts are fairly accessible. Community data is more difficult to obtain. Other data that can help define a community's risk level for suicide and attempted suicide include measures of prevalence of mental illness, depression, and substance abuse, calls to crisis hotlines, or findings from polls and surveys. These resources will help you both find and interpret data in ways that benefit your program.

Beyond Data
This web-based resource created by the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at North Carolina State University focuses on understanding data collection, needs assessments and evaluation. It includes an Information Bank describing a number of different data collection methods, sample data for each of these methods (and an interactive quiz to help users understand how to draw implications from data), and reporting and presenting data so it can be understood by others.

Finding Data on Suicidal Behavior
This SPRC publication offers suggestions on how to identify sources of data on suicidal behavior in your community.

How Do We Know We Are Making A Difference?
This website and accompanying book discuss how to use "indicators" - data that help measure the impact of a public health problem in a community. Although this book was developed for substance abuse prevention programs, much of the material is useful to those designing or evaluating any local public health prevention program.

SAMHSA's Prevention Platform
A website created by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for those working on issues of substance abuse prevention. It includes tools and resources in the areas of assessment (including data collection), capacity, planning, implementation, and evaluation that are also useful for those working to prevent suicide.

SPRC Data and Statistics
This resource will help you access existing sources of data related to suicide and suicide prevention.

Writing@CSU Writing Guides: Empirical Research
These "online textbooks" created at the Writing Center at Colorado State University provide detailed coverage of a number of important issues relevant to evaluation and other types of quantitative and qualitative research. Publications in this series include Reliability and Validity; Generalizability and Transferability; Introduction to Statistics; Experimental Methods and Design; Ethnography, Observational Research, and Narrative Inquiry; Case Studies; Survey Research; Content Analysis; and Rhetoric and the Presentation of Research.