Representational Structure of Suicide by College Students and Its Psychosocial Brands

This study aimed to identify the social representations of suicide elaborated by undergraduate and post-graduate students from Brazil. There were a number of 1053 undergraduate (37.1%) and post-graduate (62.9%) students, with an average age of 26.82 (SD = 5.88), mainly females (76.4%) who reside in the south-eastern region of Brazil (41.7%). For data collection, two questionnaires were utilized, a socio-demographic one and another that refers to the Free Word Association Technique. Data were analyzed by the software IRaMuTeQ, which allowed the execution of prototypical analyses as well as similarity ones. Results from these analyses indicate that the representational structure of suicide, created by these students, is organized around a central core that evinces the consolidation of a suicide representation directly linked to death and psychological factors, such as sadness, pain, depression, desperation, and suffering; also, there are differences on the ways to represent suicide as a function of the education level and the field of knowledge variables according to the participants. Generally speaking, the analyses developed point to the presence of psychosocial brands in the way suicide is represented, which must be taken into consideration when building interventions focused on preventing it for college students.