The construction of the SEDAS: a new suicide-attitude questionnaire

Objective: Only two scales exist for measuring attitudes towards suicidal behaviour. Because of theoretical and methodological limitations of both scales, the SEDAS was constructed to offer an alternative instrument. Method: The semantic differential scale, from which the SEDAS was devised, consisted of 36 items (pairs of adjectives) constructed to measure attitudes towards suicidal behaviour of different actors in various situations. It was administered to 142 Dutch SOS-telephone volunteers for seven different actor/situation sets. Results: Item analysis reduced the number of suitable items to 15. Simultaneous component analysis revealed two dimensions on which the actor/situation sets were scored: health/illness and acceptance/rejection, jointly accounting for 47% of variance. Psychometrics of the instrument in terms of internal consistency (values between 0.70 and 0.86), item-rest correlation and test-retest correlation (between 0.63 and 0.87) are acceptable to good. Conclusion: The SEDAS may be of value in population surveys, and facilitate effect evaluation of staff training and suicide prevention programmes.