Evaluation of university students' knowledge of suicide and their stigmatising attitudes towards people who commited suicide

This research is a methodological and descriptive research which was planned with the aim of adapting "Stigma of Suicide Scale" (SOSS) and "Literacy of Suicide Scale" (LOSS) to Turkish, to performing their validity and reliability study and of evaluating the suicidal knowledge levels of university students and their stigma attitudes towards people committing suicide. The research was conducted on university students at a state university (N=1100). After the linguistic equivalence and content validity of scales were provided, validity and reliability analyses were conducted. The Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient of SOSS was found to be 0.90. LOSS articles were determined to have fulfilled the single subscale assumption of Item Response Theory and that they are compliant with 2 Parametric Logistic Model (2PLM) Reliability for the skill level Teta (Ɵ)=1.5 about which LOSS provided most information was calculated as 0.72. It was determined that the average of total points that students got from LOSS was 9.96±3.48 and that they correctly responded the 36.88% of the total scale items. As well as the approval ratio of the "Stigma" subscale of SOSS by students is extremely low (11.5-49.2%), approval ratios of Isolation/Depression items were found to be higher compared to other subscale (51-86%). As a result, in this research it was determined that the Turkish forms scales were reliable and valid measurement tools for evaluating suicidal knowledge levels and their attitudes related with suicidal stigma of university students. It was determined that suicidal knowledge levels and suicidal stigma subscale point averages are low and that they generally correlate suicide with isolation and depression. For prevention of suicide attempts which is an important public health problem it is suggested that these scales should be used with the aim of psycho-education studies containing messages that decrease suicidal induce attitudes and increase suicidal information level, and of evaluation of education studies. Key Words: Suicide, stigma, attitude, knowledge level, scale, validity, reliability