Prevalence Trend of Suicide Commitments
Screencast Introduction
Introduction
Death by suicide is an extremely complex issue that causes pain to hundreds of thousands of people every year around the world. Globally, close to 800,000 people die from suicide every year. This makes it one of the leading causes of death globally which is in the top 15 list. In this project, with a joint dataset from United Nations Development Program, World Bank, Kaggle, and World Health Organization, we examined current trend of Suicide Commitments. In particular, we are interested in:
- What’s the general trend of suicide rate globally across the time.
- Is there any gender difference in suicide rate across the time.
- Is there any age difference in suicide rate across the time.
- the relationship between the development of a country (GDP) and suicide rate across time.
Data
The main dataset for our project is a combined dataset from summary datasets made by United Nations Development Program, World Bank, Kaggle, and World Health Organization. It can be access at here. For our purpose, regression analysis will be the main method. Details about the data and analysis can be found in the section of Regression Analysis section.
Findings
There are many interesting finds in our study. We first found that before 1995, the suicide rate at the global level is increasing, but since then, it keeps decreasing. The peak of the suicide rate among those 30 years was 1995. We also found that male has higher rate of suicide than female since 1985. Female suicide rate has a very stable trend throughout the history, while there were dramatic changes for male. For age groups effect, suicide rates for the youngest age group are nearly constant and low over time. Elder groups have had higher suicide rates since 1985, and surprisingly such trend has not changed once. Age groups 25-34, 35-54 and 55-74 had similar trends over those 30 years. GDP has been viewed as a good measure about the development of a country. However, the graph below shows that there is no obvious trend between GDP and suicide rate, although GDP’s across the world have been shifted toward larger direction. Graphs can be accessed in the Trend Graphs sections.
Our regression model indicates that all our main effects (i.e. age group, sex, GDP per capita) and the interaction term between age group and sex are statistically significant. This indicates that there indeed are group differences by age and gender. As we purposed, gender can have different impacts on amount of suicides regarding to different age groups. An interesting finding is that although there is no obvious trend between the amount of suicides and GDP per capita based on the graph in the Trend Graphs section, the regression output shows that GDP per capita does have a statistically significant effect on amount of suicides. Further detailed analyses are in the Regression Analysis sections.
Report
Our report can be found here.