Lee Bandy X, Marotta Phillip L, Blay-Tofey Morkeh, Wang Winnie, de Bourmont Shalila
Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.
Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.
Aggress Violent Behav. 2014 Nov-Dec;19(6):729-737. doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2014.09.016.
Our goal was to identify if there might be advantages to combining two major public health concerns, i.e., homicides and suicides, in an analysis with well-established macro-level economic determinants, i.e., unemployment and inequality.
Mortality data, unemployment statistics, and inequality measures were obtained for 40 countries for the years 1962-2008. Rates of combined homicide and suicide, ratio of suicide to combined violent death, and ratio between homicide and suicide were graphed and analyzed. A fixed effects regression model was then performed for unemployment rates and Gini coefficients on homicide, suicide, and combined death rates.
For a majority of nation states, suicide comprised a substantial proportion (mean 75.51%; range 0-99%) of the combined rate of homicide and suicide. When combined, a small but significant relationship emerged between logged Gini coefficient and combined death rates (0.0066, p < 0.05), suggesting that the combined rate improves the ability to detect a significant relationship when compared to either rate measurement alone. Results were duplicated by age group, whereby combining death rates into a single measure improved statistical power, provided that the association was strong.
Violent deaths, when combined, were associated with an increase in unemployment and an increase in Gini coefficient, creating a more robust variable. As the effects of macro-level factors (e.g., social and economic policies) on violent death rates in a population are shown to be more significant than those of micro-level influences (e.g., individual characteristics), these associations may be useful to discover. An expansion of socioeconomic variables and the inclusion of other forms of violence in future research could help elucidate long-term trends.
我们的目标是确定在将两大公共卫生问题，即杀人与自杀，与既定的宏观经济决定因素，即失业和不平等，进行分析时是否可能存在优势。
获取了1962年至2008年40个国家的死亡率数据、失业统计数据和不平等衡量指标。绘制并分析了杀人与自杀合并率、自杀与暴力死亡合并率的比率以及杀人和自杀之间的比率。然后针对失业率和基尼系数对杀人、自杀及合并死亡率进行了固定效应回归模型分析。
对于大多数国家，自杀在杀人与自杀合并率中占很大比例（平均75.51%；范围0 - 99%）。合并后，对数化的基尼系数与合并死亡率之间出现了微弱但显著的关系（0.0066，p < 0.05），这表明与单独的任何一种比率测量相比，合并率提高了检测显著关系的能力。按年龄组重复了结果，即只要关联较强，将死亡率合并为单一指标可提高统计效力。
暴力死亡合并后与失业率上升和基尼系数增加相关，从而产生了一个更稳健的变量。由于宏观层面因素（如社会和经济政策）对人群暴力死亡率的影响比微观层面影响（如个体特征）更为显著，这些关联可能有助于发现问题。在未来研究中扩大社会经济变量并纳入其他形式的暴力可能有助于阐明长期趋势。
