Assessing paraprofessional competence with the Suicide Intervention Response Inventory.

Abstract

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.

Suicide Intervention Training for K–12 Schools: A Quasi‐Experimental Study on ASIST

“…This scoring approach was an improvement over the scoring approach of the original SIRI (Neimeyer & MacInnes, 1981), which merely asked participants to choose the most helpful of the two responses and had a significant ceiling effect (Neimeyer & Bonnelle, 1997). The Suicide Intervention Response Inventory-Second Edition (SIRI-2; Neimeyer & Bonnelle, 1997) is a 48-item scale that assesses suicide intervention skills by evaluating the appropriateness of a caregiver's responses to a person at risk of suicide.…”

“…Lower scores on the SIRI-2 indicate higher suicide intervention skills (i.e., participant ratings are less divergent from expert ratings). This scoring approach was an improvement over the scoring approach of the original SIRI (Neimeyer & MacInnes, 1981), which merely asked participants to choose the most helpful of the two responses and had a significant ceiling effect (Neimeyer & Bonnelle, 1997). The SIRI-2 validation contains an extensive discussion of both construct and discriminant validity, and reports high internal consistencies (α = .90 and α = .93) and test-retest reliability (r = .92), although it does have a relatively small sample size (N = 62).…”

Short‐Term Suicide Awareness Curriculum

“…Suicide Intervention Response Scale. The Suicide Intervention Response Scale (SIRI; Neimeyer & MacInnes, 1981) was developed to assess paraprofessional competence following suicide intervention training. It includes 25 items, each of which offers an initial "client" remark, followed by two possible "helper" replies.…”

Suicide Intervention Skills and Related Factors in Community and Health Professionals

“…Experience—either professional experience, such as level of suicide‐specific training and experience with suicidal patients (but not mere years as a care provider), or experience with suicidal people in one's personal environment—has been found to be positively related to suicide intervention skills (Botega et al, 2005; Neimeyer et al, 2001; Neimeyer & MacInnes, 1981). With regard to one's own suicidality, negative as well as positive relations have been found.…”