title: How much detail needs to be elucidated in self-harm research?
abstract: Assessing self-harm through brief multiple choice items is simple and less invasive than more detailed methods of assessment. However, there is currently little validation for brief methods of self-harm assessment. This study evaluates the extent to which adolescents' perceptions of self-harm agree with definitions in the literature, and what level of question detail produces optimal concordance rates. Two hundred and thirty-three (69% female) first year university students aged 17-21 completed a self-harm coding task; we created three levels of question detail and randomly allocated participants to three study groups: brief, low detail, and high detail. The present findings suggest that that adolescents' perceptions of self-harm are generally concordant with a consensus definition of self-harm. Low level of detail in the question produced greatest accuracy in responses; adolescents who demonstrated adequate task understanding were able to correctly identify 94% of examples of self-harm behaviour and 86% of examples of behaviour that were not self-harm. We identified lower concordance rates for eating disordered behaviour and recreational petrol sniffing. This indicates that adolescents perceive these behaviours to be self-harm, in contrast to the reference definition we utilised. Overall, this study provides support for using a brief assessment of self-harm where minimal detail regarding self-harm behaviour is required.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia. stanfordsarah@hotmail.com
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Stanford
authors.forename: Michael P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Jones
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D036262:Empirical Research; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D016728:Self-Injurious Behavior / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*; D055815:Young Adult