Should suicide prevention programs target individuals or society as a whole?

The issue of whether it is more useful to focus on societal interventions to prevent suicide or individual-centered approaches is discussed. The advantages and drawbacks of each approach are explored.     

The 2015 Catalan Election: The Independence Bid at the Polls

This paper examines the context, campaign and main determinants of how Catalans voted in the 2015 regional election. The elections were exceptional because the incumbent and the remaining Catalan nationalist parties framed the contest as a de facto referendum on secession. In this paper we scrutinise whether attitudes towards independence affected vote choice and whether they eclipsed other traditional significant vote-driving factors such as the state of the economy or government performance. Results show that, although the independence issue became a major determinant of vote choice, the elections did not become a pure plebiscite on secession, since voters also used their vote to hold the regional government accountable for its past performance.     

Construct validity and internal reliability of the Finnish risk and needs assessment form

Validation of risk and needs assessment instruments used to predict, and reduce, recidivism and misconduct is of ethical, practical and scientific importance. We argue for a focus on variable (i.e. changeable over time) risk factors, and that validation begins with establishing construct validity. The Finnish Risk and Needs Assessment Form, in Finnish Riski- ja tarvearvio (RITA), is a semi-structured interview form adapted from the Offender Assessment System used in England and Wales and consists primarily of variable risk factors. In this study, we examined the construct validity and internal reliability of RITA. The results suggest that the original RITA sections do not provide an adequate statistical model for describing the relationship between scored questions, and we, therefore, offer an improved model. In our proposed model, several scores are influenced by more than one dimension of risk and the dimensions correlate with each other considerably. We suggest that the dimensions that can be measured with RITA are Problems managing economy, Alcohol problems, Resistance to change, Drug abuse and associated behaviour, Aggressiveness and Employment problems. All factors except Drug abuse and associated behaviour had very good internal reliability. We propose this new model to be used in future research with, and in development of, RITA.