Evaluating an Agricultural Community Suicide Prevention Program: Instrumentation and Impact

Highlights This paper details an evaluation of a piloted community-based farmer suicide prevention training program using a revised Willingness to Intervene Against Suicide Questionnaire. Indicating program utility and impact, willingness to intervene with a person in crisis increased by 0.21 logits (p<0.01) in program participants who completed pre- and post-training surveys. A comparison of growth in the willingness to intervene variable across participant demographics and characteristics revealed a change of 0.43 logits among males, compared to 0.096 for females (p=0.059). Researchers recommend that the program be tailored to consider gender differences. Abstract. In this study, researchers detail an evaluation of a pilot community-based farmer suicide prevention program that used QPR-based training customized for the agricultural community. Community-based mental health programs have been cited as key to addressing the worldwide suicide rate, but evidence of their execution and utility is not well documented, particularly within the agricultural community context. Researchers used Kirkpatrick's (1998) training evaluation model and a pre-post one-group design (Eseryel, 2002) of consenting training participants to conduct a preliminary assessment of programmatic impact. Using a revised Willingness to Intervene Against Suicide Questionnaire (Aldrich et al., 2014), which treated the questionnaire as an interval level scale suitable for parametric analysis, researchers found statistically significant differences in pre-training willingness to intervene between male and female respondents as well as those who work in agriculture and those who do not. An analysis of those respondents who completed both pre- and post-training surveys indicated statistically significant growth of 0.21 logits in the willingness to intervene variable, as well as remarkable growth for male participants in comparison to female participants. Keywords: . Evaluation of suicide prevention program, Farmer suicide prevention, Rasch analysis, Willingness to intervene.