The interviews were conducted over the phone, with a letter introducing the survey sent to each household of a selected telephone number up to 8 weeks prior. In each household, an adult (18+) was selected to take the survey by who was the person having the last birthday. Up to 5 callbacks were made to try and interview the selected person, and no replacements for those unable to be reached. The 9 interviewers were specially trained to get correct data. Interviews were given in English, Italian, Greek and Vietnamese. The main interest was the population attributable risk to suicidal ideation. Assumptions for the validity of the statistic are that there is a casual relation between risk factor and disease, that those previously exposed would have the unexposed risk of the disease if the risk factor was eliminated, and that risk factors are independent of each other. .
3. The Results.
Out of 3,384 initial subjects, 2,501 participated in the survey, giving a 74% response rate. 395 refused, 356 were not able to be contacted after 5 attempts, 53 were not able to speak any of the given languages of English, Italian, Greek or Vietnamese. 64 were unable to be interviewed, and 12 stopped the interview before giving complete data. .
It was recorded that, overall, 5.4% of interviewed subjects scored at least one response to indicate suicidal ideation. This broke down to 5.6% of men and 5.3% of women. Some other contributors to suicidal ideations were unemployment and making less than $40,000 per year, using alcohol at a high risk level, having clinical depression, having experienced a psychosocial event in the last 12 months, and being exposed to one or more traumatic events. It also seemed that being between 35 and 54 years of age had statistical significance. Other psychosocial events that were recorded the most included unplanned loss of a job, family or domestic violence, death of somebody close, discrimination, moving house, being robbed or burgled, having a marriage/relationship breakdown, and having a serious illness or injury.