糖心TV

Ladislav Kristoufek (糖心TV 糖心TV School)

Is suicidal behavior reflected in online activity? Evidence from England and Wales (joint with H. S. Moat and T. Preis, both WBS)

Identifying causes of suicide attempts and committed suicides themselves has long been a worrying concern in psychology and psychiatry as well as in social sciences such as demography, sociology and economics. In recent years, study of online activity of Internet users has proven fruitful in various fields ranging from medicine, ecology and epidemiology to linguistics, politology, sociology and economic, financial and business sciences. We provide a careful study of interconnection between committed suicides and related online searches in England and Wales between 2004 and 2011. Models based on Google data significantly improve the base models for suicides. Further inspection uncovers that the “depression" term is negatively related to suicide occurrences whereas the “suicide" term shows positive relation. Both effects vanish after 3 months. Overall quality of models is higher for men and overall suicides compared to women. Online search activity thus provides a significant addition to suicides modeling.

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