Changes to Youth Suicide Rate Trends by Province in Canada (1950-2019) as Indicative of Major Social Structural Shifts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study of suicide remains predominantly psychocentric and individualistic, often overlooking social dimensions. This thesis presents a sociological analysis of suicide as a crucial complement to individualistic approaches. Male and female suicide rates are analysed for the period spanning 1950 to 2019, by Canadian province, with a particular focus on youth suicide. A descriptive analysis highlights the simultaneous emergence of youth suicide across all provinces as of the 1960s. While rates for both sexes rose in unison, female youth suicide rates continued to rise through to 2019, whereas rates for males generally plateaued at a new ‘normal’. Previously nearly non-existent, youth suicide has since matched or exceeded rates in traditionally higher-risk age groups. An age, period, and cohort (APC) analysis was subsequently conducted to model temporal trends using the APC-Interaction model. The findings indicate notable estimated cohort effects, with increased suicide risks for males born between 1960-1974 and females born after 1985. These results underscore the need for a sociological perspective in suicidology, demonstrating how social forces shape suicide trends. Without a sociological perspective, suicide is framed as almost exclusively an individual act, overlooking broader socio-historical influences. By mapping youth suicide trends across all Canadian provinces over seven decades, this study addresses a critical gap in the literature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".