Do Gender and Age Moderate the Relationship between Friendship Quality and Non-Suicidal Self-Injury in Community Children and Adolescents?

Prevalence of suicidal ideation and self-harm behaviours in children aged 12 years and younger: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…All four studies on selfharm 13,27,28,33 relied on parental report only, perhaps understating the true prevalence of self-harm. For NSSI, one study based on the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (also known as ABCD) cohort reported a prevalence of 9% in children aged 9-10 years, 17 whereas another study from a small convenience sample reported a prevalence of 44•5%, 35 suggesting that the prevalence of NSSI can vary considerably depending on how questions are formulated. Further research on the assessment of NSSI in young children is, therefore, warranted.…”

“…The prevalence of suicide attempts was 1•3% (95% CI 1•0-1•9) from six studies, 16,17,26,31,38,39 and the prevalence of self-harm was 1•4% (0•4-4•7) from four studies. 13,27,28,33 Only two studies 17,35 reported on NSSI, the pooled prevalence of which was 21 For all pooled estimates, we found little evidence that publication bias could have influenced our results (appendix shows funnel plots [p 11], risk of bias for suicidal ideation and self-harm behaviours [p 8], leaveone-out analysis for suicidal ideation [p 9], and leave-oneout analysis for self-harm behaviours [p 10]). However, the trim-and-fill method indicated that six studies were potentially missing for suicidal ideation and four studies were potentially missing for self-harm behaviours.…”

“…26 NSSI was rated by both parents and child using one item, engaging "in purposeful behaviours (eg, hitting, cutting, burning oneself, head banging) in order to experience physical injury for reasons other than dying by suicide (eg, to feel better or relieve emotional pain)" in one study, 17 and by the child with five items of NSSI (eg, self-cutting) from the Self Harm Inventory in another study. 35 In terms of diagnostic interview, the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia interview 42 was used in four studies 14,17,22,26 (one study 17 used a computerised version) and eight other studies used different diagnostic interview instruments. 19,20,23,24,29,31,37,38 For the risk of bias assessment, only 12 (40%) of the 30 studies met the criteria for sample representativeness (table table 2).…”

Associations between coping styles, gender, their interaction and non-suicidal self-injury among middle school students in rural west China: A multicentre cross-sectional study

“…In addition, numerous studies have shown that self-injurious behaviors show significant differences by gender ( 19 – 22 ). There may be differences in the psychological mechanisms underlying the occurrence of non-suicidal self-injurious behaviors across genders ( 23 – 25 ). On the one hand, studies have found that women have higher prevalence of non-suicidal self-injury than men, and such gender differences are consistent for depression and anxiety ( 19 ).…”

“…On the other hand, it has been suggested that boys and girls have different motivations for self-injury, with boys emphasizing social concerns and girls focusing on emotional expression ( 29 ). In a study on the relationship between alexithymia and self-injury, for example, alexithymia was positively associated with self-injury for girls and negatively associated with self-injury for boys ( 23 , 24 ); while another study of the relationship between friendship quality and self-injury found that girls with low friendship quality were more likely to self-injure, while the opposite was true for boys ( 25 ). As there are differences in the motivations of boys and girls for self-injury, it can be assumed that these differences are also present in the relationship between coping styles and self-injury.…”