Development of the College Student Reasons for Living Inventory with African Americans

Abstract

Two studies were carried out in an effort to develop and evaluate an instrument designed to assess suicidal risk in college students. Study 1 describes the development of the College Student Reasons for Living Inventory (CSRLI), an instrument that measures the extent to which college students place importance on various reasons for living even when contemplating suicide. The impetus for the current study was provided by Linehan et al., who in 1983 developed the Reasons for Living Inventory for use with adults. In the current study college students generated a series of 84 “reasons for living” items, which were reduced through factor analysis to a final inventory of 46 items. Six factors were extracted as follows: Survival and Coping Beliefs, College and Future‐Related Concerns, Moral Objections, Responsibility to Friends and Family, Fear of Suicide, and Fear of Social Disapproval. Five of these factors reflect the same basic themes contained in the Linehan et al. (1983) study. The sixth factor (College and Future‐Related Concerns) appears to be unique to college students. Linehan et al.'s Child‐Related Concerns factor expectedly did not appear in this college sample. In Study 2 initial evaluation of the CSRLI was carried out through the use of correlational, confirmatory factor, and discriminant analyses. Results indicate that the CSRLI holds promise as an instrument to predict suicidal risk among college students.

Development of the reasons for living inventory for young adults

“…Finally, a 6-point rating format, 1 (not an important reason at all ) to 6 (an extremely important reason), was specified for this new inventory. The RFL-YA item and scale contents do not overlap with either the Linehan's RFL or the CS-RFL (Westefeld et al, 1992).…”

“…Although a college student version of the measure exists, we chose to start from scratch, employing more contemporary scale-development techniques in an effort to create a more psychometrically sound measure than the one developed by Westefeld et al (1992). We also sought to address the two issues discussed earlier by introducing new dimensions of the protective construct and by creating a brief, quick-to-administer scale.…”

“…We retained 12 (appropriate for use with college students) items directly from the RFL-A and generated 54 new items. Specifically, we (a) asked 42 (18 males and 24 females) undergraduate students (10 freshmen, 8 sophomores, 12 juniors, and 12 seniors) from several psychology classes to generate written statements of reasons that a young adult might give for deciding not to end his or her life if the thought were to occur to him or her, (b) reviewed the literature on suicide and examined items on psychometrically derived, self-report instruments (Linehan et al, 1983;Orbach et al, 1991;Osman et al, 1996;Westefeld et al, 1992), and (c) asked 16 students in a research methods class to generate potential items for this new inventory. Next, we asked one clinical psychologist and one youth counselor at a state psychiatric inpatient institution to rate each item for clarity and relevancy to the assessment of suicidal behavior in college students aged 17 to 30 years.…”

“…metric properties of this College Student Reasons for Living Inventory (CS-RFL) in general (Rogers & Hanlon, 1996;Westefeld, Badura, Kiel, & Scheel, 1996b) and with African American students (Westefeld, Badura, Kiel, & Scheel, 1996a) are acceptable. There are two primary limitations to the CS-RFL.…”

Attachment Pattern, Reasons for Living, and Suicide Risk Among College Students

“…Evidence of external validity, also, is that it is significantly correlated with the Suicide Screening Instrument (r = .60; Cotton et al, 1995 The CS-RFL is internally consistent (a = 3 1 ) . Evidence of concurrent validity is provided through its correlations with the Beck Depression Inventory and the Suicidal Risk Questionnaire (Westefeld et al, 1992).…”