title: Nursing personnel attitudes towards suicide: the development of a measure scale.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Psychology and Psychiatry, School of Medical Sciences, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil. botega@fcm.unicamp.br
authors.forename: Neury José
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Botega
authors.forename: Diogo Gomes
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Reginato
authors.forename: Sidney Volk
authors.initials: SV
authors.lastname: da Silva
authors.forename: Carlos Filinto da Silva
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Cais
authors.forename: Claudemir Benedito
authors.initials: CB
authors.lastname: Rapeli
authors.forename: Marisa Lúcia Fabrício
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Mauro
authors.forename: Janaína Phillipe
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Cecconi
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Stefanello
mesh_terms: 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*