Suicidality among Students: An Experiment of Agnew's General Strain Theory

Agnew's general strain theory is one of the best known theories of criminology. The popularity of this theory is derived from its scope and breadth which allows researchers to investigate about the effects of a variety of structural and psychological stressors on a range of deleterious outcomes. Although this theory is developed and tested to explain crime, it can also be applied to explain behaviors such as substance abuse and suicide. The main objective of this study is to provide a sociological explanation of suicidality among students of Mazandaran University. Accordingly, the main research question is: "how suicidality can be explained among students on the basis of Agnew's general strain theory. Suicide is described as the endpoint of a continuum that begins with suicide ideation (consideration of suicide), followed by planning and preparing for suicide and finally attempting and completing suicide. It is one of the problems of the present era. According to statistics, the number of younger individuals who attempt suicide is increasing. Based on available statistics and studies worldwide, suicide is the third cause of death in the age group of 15-24 years, and is the second cause of death among college students. According to a study in the United States (2001), in the period of 1999 to 2000, 9.5% of students reported that they had seriously considered attempting suicide and 1.5% of students reported that they had attempted suicide within the last school year. In Iran, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, between the years of 1998 to 2004, 292 suicide attempts were reported among students, of which 25 cases (8/6 percent) were successful. Also, Panaghi and others demonstrated that during the years of 2006 to 2008, 230 suicide attempts have occurred among student. Based on the maximum rate of student suicide in Iran, this is means 3 individuals out of 100000 have committed suicide. So we can say that as a young people of society, university students are vulnerable to suicide. The purpose of this study is to study a range of stressors which can explain suicidality from the viewpoint of Agnew’s general strain theory. Research method in this study is surveys and data collection is done via questionnaire. In this study, dependent variable is suicidality and independent variables include relational strain, status strain, removal of positive stimuli and exposure to negative stimuli. The research population is consisted of all students enrolled at Mazandaran University in the academic year 2011-2012, of whom a sample of 438 individuals were selected using random stratified sampling method. The data is analyzed using SPSS software and utilizing multiple regression analysis. To examine the validity of the questionnaire, face validity and content validity were used. To determine the reliability of the study, Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used. Discussion of Result & This study examined the impacts of several variables from Agnew’s general strain theory on suicidality. The results suggest that general strain theory is to some extent effective in explaining student's suicidality and can provide a theoretical model for studying suicide. The results of the study show that there is direct and significant relationship between removal of positive stimuli and suicidality, in the sense that by increasing in the likelihood of this variable, the rate of suicidality also increases. So when a person tries to deal with removal of positive stimuli, he or she is more likely to engage in deviant behaviors such as suicide. The results also suggest that students with status strain are more likely to experience suicidality. Likewise, students with relational strain are more likely to experience suicidality. A person who is exposed to more negative relationships with others, will be more likely to committee suicide. Thus, the findings suggest that a positive relationship with family and peers is an important protective factor against suicidality. Multiple regression analysis also shows that independent variables of this study are strong predictors of suicidality, they include removal of positive stimulus (beta coefficient=0/147), status strain (beta coefficient=0/140), relational strain (beta coefficient=0/127).