Suicide leads to multiple deaths every year. If we had a better idea of what factors (e.g. location/age/gender) might result in higher suicide rates, this could help with awareness and prevention efforts.
Our proposed app can be used for informed decision making, as outlined in our research questions and example scenarios in Section 3. More specifically, our app would:
- Provide a thorough outline of how suicide rates have changed over time in terms of multiple factors such as location, age, and gender,
- Allow for the identification of high-risk-for-suicide groups (based on demographics) within a country, and
- Allow for the comparison of suicide rates between countries for these groups.
Each observation represents a country’s annual suicide count from 1985 to 2016. The observations are associated with different subsegments of each country’s population. The subsegments include:
- Gender (Male / Female), and
- Age Group (5-14, 15-24, 25-34, 35-54, 55-74 and 75+)
In addition to the suicide count for each subsegment, we also have the country’s population for that subsegment, a suicide rate per 100k inhabitants, GDP for the year, and generation information for the demographic group. In order to calculate summarized indicators at the continent and region level, we have additionally joined this dataset with another dataset that associates each country to a continent and to a sub-region (e.g. North, Central, South America).
Link to original (suicide) dataset
Link to continent and subregion dataset
Research Question 1: How does the suicide rate change over time, and what effect does continent, region, country, age, and gender have on this?
Usage Scenario:
Riley is a philanthropist looking to open a new suicide awareness centre. To investigate which locations, age groups, and/or genders the centre should focus on reaching based on the last 5-10 years, he can use our app to [explore] and [analyze] suicide rates over time by location and demographic group to help inform his decision.
Research Question 2: How does the suicide rate of one country compare against the suicide of another country?
Usage Scenario:
Alice's friend has been expressing thoughts about self harm and she wants to know whether suicide rates for her friend’s age and gender are more/less common in another country that she thinks is similar to her own. Using our app, she can [compare] the suicide rate of her country against that of another country so she can [identify] which country has the lower suicide rate for her friend’s age and gender.
When using our app, Riley and Alice can [explore] suicide rates over time for [selected] regions and countries, and [compare] the average suicide rates for different demographic groups in these locations on the same tab (Research Question 1). On a second tab, they can further [compare] the suicide rates for two [specified] countries by a [selected] demographic groups and a [chosen] time period (Research Question 2).
In exploring the suicide rates by continent, region, country, age, and gender using our app, we hope that Riley and Alice, and all other app users would be better able to answer their own research questions about suicide.