Theses and Dissertations Collection

Suicide is defined as the act of causing harm to oneself with the goal of dying is a growing public health concern. It tends to claim the lives of both the old and young. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated number of $800,000$ people have been reported to die each year by suicide.

Most published literature are concerned with the rate of suicide but not much work has been done in determining how certain populations or interest groups are at risk of suicide beyond the broad classification of rural and urban. As a result, this work aimed at estimating suicide relative risk levels in all counties in Idaho using a statistical model. Each county's risk obtained is relative to the entire population. Specifically, a Bayesian hierarchical Poisson was used to get these estimates.

Custer and Madison counties were found to have the highest and lowest relative risks respectively when age was unadjusted. After age adjustment, Clark county had the highest relative risk and Ada had the lowest relative risk.

Average unemployment rates were compared with the relative risks the answer the question of possible causation. From the results, unemployment rates cannot be concluded as the sole cause of high/low suicide relative risks as some high risk areas had average or low unemployment rates.