This article reports the development and validation of the Suicide Intervention Response Inventory, a self-administered questionnaire designed to assess the paraprofessional's ability to select an appropriate response to the self-destructive client. The Suicide Intervention Response Inventory demonstrated the ability to discriminate among three groups of 28 respondents known to differ in suicide counseling skills, and it detected enhancement of such skills in 127 volunteers over the course of crisis intervention training. As predicted, the Suicide Intervention Response Inventory also showed moderate convergence with the Counseling Skills Evaluation technique, an instrument devised to tap more general capacities for facilitative responding. These preliminary indications of the validity of the Suicide Intervention Response Inventory, coupled with its high internal consistency and test-retest reliability, suggest that it may be a useful adjunct to more general indices of counseling effectiveness in screening, evaluating, and researching paraprofessionals who deal with potentially suicidal clients.

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