Nursing personnel attitudes towards suicide: the development of a measure scale.
OBJECTIVE
To describe the construction of the Suicide Behavior Attitude Questionnaire (SBAQ) which measures attitudes of nursing personnel towards suicide, and verify attitude differences among these professionals.


METHODS
The Suicide Behavior Attitude Questionnaire comprises 21 visual analogue scale items (beliefs, feelings and reactions on suicidal patients) selected from a pool of attitude statements generated by focal groups and experts' judgement. The questionnaire was completed by 317 nursing professionals who worked in a teaching hospital. Factor analysis and internal consistency were calculated.


RESULTS
Three interpretable factors were extracted, accounting jointly for 40% of the total variance: Feelings when caring for the patient, Professional Capacity and Right to Suicide, comprising 7, 4 and 5 items, respectively. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients were 0.7, 0.6 and 0.5, respectively. Greater Professional Capacity was reported by nursing assistants and those who had already took care of suicidal patients. The belief that a person does not have the right to commit suicide was stronger among older professionals, those who had never taken care of suicidal patients, those who had a family history of suicide, those who were Protestants and that used to go more frequently to church services.


CONCLUSIONS
The Suicide Behavior Attitude Questionnaire proved to be user-friendly and quite a simple instrument to assess attitude towards suicide among nursing personnel.
Botega
Neury José
NJ
Department of Medical Psychology and Psychiatry, School of Medical Sciences, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil. botega@fcm.unicamp.br
Reginato
Diogo Gomes
DG
da Silva
Sidney Volk
SV
Cais
Carlos Filinto da Silva
CF
Rapeli
Claudemir Benedito
CB
Mauro
Marisa Lúcia Fabrício
ML
Cecconi
Janaína Phillipe
JP
Stefanello
Sabrina
S
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009726:Nurses / Q000523:psychology*; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013405:Suicide / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*