Article Text
Abstract
Background Intimate partner violence (IPV) victims and perpetrators often report suicidal ideation, yet there is no comprehensive national dataset that allows for an assessment of the connection between IPV and suicide. The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) captures IPV circumstances for homicide-suicides (<2% of suicides), but not single suicides (suicide unconnected to other violent deaths; >98% of suicides).
Objective To facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the co-occurrence of IPV and suicide, we developed and validated a tool that detects mentions of IPV circumstances (yes/no) for single suicides in NVDRS death narratives.
Methods We used 10 000 hand-labelled single suicide cases from NVDRS (2010–2018) to train (n=8500) and validate (n=1500) a classification model using supervised machine learning. We used natural language processing to extract relevant information from the death narratives within a concept normalisation framework. We tested numerous models and present performance metrics for the best approach.
Results Our final model had robust sensitivity (0.70), specificity (0.98), precision (0.72) and kappa values (0.69). False positives mostly described other family violence. False negatives used vague and heterogeneous language to describe IPV, and often included abusive suicide threats.
Implications It is possible to detect IPV circumstances among singles suicides in NVDRS, although vague language in death narratives limited our tool’s sensitivity. More attention to the role of IPV in suicide is merited both during the initial death investigation processes and subsequent NVDRS reporting. This tool can support future research to inform targeted prevention.
- Suicide/Self?Harm
- Violence
- Firearm
- Epidemiology
- Methodology
- Mortality
Data availability statement
Data may be obtained from a third party. Restricted Access Data (RAD) from the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) can be obtained through a request to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The supervised machine learning tool developed from this study is available online, along with a tutorial at the following link: https://github.com/jkafka/IPV-suicide.