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MA/PhD Theses Abstracts of Current Students & Alumni |
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Stone, Jack Scott. 1980. - Hillsborough County Subcommittee on Suicide Among Children and Youth Recommendations: An Analysis.
ABSTRACT: In response to the problem of adolescent suicide, a task force was forced to determine if such a problem exists in Hillsborough County and, if so, to make recommendations to Donald L. Whittemore, Chairperson, Task Force V: Children's Study Commission, to deal with this problem. Susan Wohlbrook, subcommittee leader of Task Force V: General/Community-Wide Recommendations, was assigned to find out the rates of suicide among youth in Hillsborough County, and to conduct a literature search regarding adolescent suicide. Discussions with two groups of youth, along with a paper by Deborah Marciniak, led this subcommittee to draft thirteen recommendations for dealing with adolescent suicide. This researcher's internship was at the Florida Mental Health Institute under the supervision of Nelle Wheeler. I was to ascertain agencies' and other professionals' reactions to and ideas of how to implement the subcomittee's recommendations. I interviewed thirty-one people who deal with youth or youth services. I used face-to-face unstructured interviews which were tape recorded with my respondents' permission. The responses toward the recommendations were rated by three independent judges who were not affiliated with the study. The rating system developed was: negative, neutral, or positive toward each recom- mendation. The overall reactions to the recommendations were positive. The scores were high, considering the fact that the respondents were not queried as to their input toward the development of the recommendations. Seven of the recommendations scored above the mean of 2.758 (a score of 3.000 would be positive, a score of 2.000 would be neutral) and should be addressed and discussed further. This researcher's overall evaluation of this research project was that it was quite successful. I helped create a communication linkage between youth serving agencies and professionals that probably was, and still is, lacking. Only one or two people interviewed were cognizant that there were recommendations dealing with adolescent suicide, or that a County-wide study commission was interested in it. One of the problems in this study was that the recommendations were developed without getting input from the agencies and professionals that have to implement them. I would have preferred a more holistic approach to developing these recommendations. I feel an anthropological perspective on this human service oriented research would have been beneficial from its onset.
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