Abstract
Research suggests that media adherence to suicide reporting recommendations in the aftermath of a highly publicized suicide event can help reduce the risk of imitative behavior, yet there exists no standardized tool for assessing adherence to these standards. The Tool for Evaluating Media Portrayals of Suicide (TEMPOS) allows media professionals, researchers, and suicide prevention experts to assess adherence to the recommendations with a user-friendly, standardized rating scale. An interdisciplinary team of raters constructed operational definitions for three levels of adherence to each of the reporting recommendations and piloted the scale on a sample of articles to assess reliability and clarify scale definitions. TEMPOS was then used to evaluate 220 news articles published during a high-risk period following the suicide deaths of two public figures. Post-hoc analyses of the results demonstrated how data produced by TEMPOS can be used to inform research and public health efforts, and inter-rater reliability analyses revealed substantial agreement across raters and criteria. A novel, wide-reaching, and practical approach to suicide prevention, TEMPOS allows researchers, suicide prevention professionals, and media professionals to study how adherence varies across contexts and can be used to guide future efforts to decrease the risk of media-induced suicide contagion.
Highlights
Suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, with over 800,000 people dying by suicide annually, more than war, malaria, or breast cancer [1]
Professionals engaged in regional or broad-reaching prevention programs can use Tool for Evaluating Media Portrayals of Suicide (TEMPOS) to better understand how media adherence to suicide reporting recommendations varies among criteria, across and within publications, and over time
TEMPOS is a novel, user-friendly, and reliable tool for assessing adherence to suicide reporting recommendations that can be used by researchers, suicide prevention professionals, and media professionals alike
Summary
Suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, with over 800,000 people dying by suicide annually, more than war, malaria, or breast cancer [1]. Media representations of suicide can influence the contagion of suicidal behavior, in vulnerable populations. Rates of self-harm and suicide attempts have been increasing in recent years [2,3], and a growing body of research has established a link between self-harm and increased media use [4–6]. Suicide mortality tends to increase following highly publicized suicide events, a phenomenon known as the Werther Effect [7]. The association between media reporting and suicide contagion is well established as a globally reaching public health concern, documented in over 150 empirical studies and systematic reviews from around the world [8–12]. Newspaper coverage of suicide has been found to be significantly associated with the initiation of suicide clusters [13], and a substantial number of suicide attempt survivors report being affected by a media story about suicide [14,15].
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