Influence of the factors associated with suicides: A case study in the Kelaniya police division in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Suicide is a major public health problem worldwide and moreover it is considered as a social problem. In Sri Lanka, suicides have been a major social and economic burden for the previous three decades. Hence, developing a statistical analysis on suicides is a fruitful study for the country. This case study aims at identifying factors that mainly associated with suicides in the selected area covered by twelve police stations under Kelaniya Police Division. Secondary data were collected from those police stations from 2013 to 2017. Addiction to narcotic drugs, chronic disease, economic problems, loss, love affairs, mental disorder and family disputes were considered as explanatory variables. The significantly associated explanatory variables were identified using a univariate analysis and included in the multivariate analysis to perform multinomial logistic regression.Attained results implies that, civil status, age and gender were identified as influenced factors for both chronic disease and mental disorder. Economic problems are influenced by age and gender. Civil status has an impact on loss. Moreover, Education level, civil status, gender and age were identified as having impacts on love affairs.Due to encountered classification problems and high number of coefficients of the factors were insignificant in themodel, above dependent variables were re-categorized based on the influence for suicide which lead to fit a binary logistic regression model. Based on the results, civil status, education level and occupation and age were identified as influenced factors for suicides from the final model with the accuracy of 72.6% correctly classified