Suicide Risk In Young Adults

Running head: CRITICAL APPRAISAL
Critical appraisal
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

1CRITICAL APPRAISAL
Part 1: INTRODUCTION
The assignment 1 and 2 focused on identifying the cause behind depression and suicide
risk in young adults and evaluate whether their perceptions or experiences related to depression
influenced suicide and depression outcome in youths or not. Research in this area was done
because of high rate of depression in youths and the need to find out the contextual factors that
increase risk of depression and suicide in this population. One primary research article by Orri et
al. (2014) and one systematic review by Grimmond et al. (2019) was identified as the best article
to answer the research question. The main purpose of this paper is conduct critical appraisal of
the two papers to find out how well they meet the research objective and give answer to the
research questions. The intention is to critically appraise the methodology used in each paper and
evaluate whether the information is trustworthy and applicable too meet the above information
need.
The first primary article that will be appraised is the study by Orri et al. (2014) that used
qualitative approach to evaluate the perspective of adolescents who are directly involved in
suicidal acts. The CASP (Critical Appraisals Skills Programme) tool for qualitative study has
been chosen as the critical appraisal tool for the paper and the main rationale for selecting the
CAPS tool is that it has separate checklist for assessment of journal articles based on the research
design and it has questions to evaluate not just the research methodology, but also presence of
any bias or validity issues in the paper. The CASP tool can help to determine the rigor of
qualitative study and evaluate the internal consistency between study aims and findings (Kim,
Sefcik & Bradway, 2017). Hence, by using CASP for qualitative study, it will be possible to
appraise the paper according to the main features and quality requirement in a qualitative

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research paper. According to Galdas (2017), CASP is a popular tool that is widely used in
clinical research as it focuses on establishing reliability and validity in qualitative research.
The second article that will be appraised is the systematic review titled ‘A qualitative
systematic review of experiences and perceptions of youth suicide’ by Grimmond et al. (2019).
The CASP tool for systematic review has been chosen as the critical appraisal tool for this study
as this study uses 10 questions to make sense of the research design. This checklist enables
exploring rigour in the area of quality assessment of the included studies, combining the findings
and consideration of all important outcomes (CASP, 2020). Hence, the checklist is likely to
guide in determining whether the above article fulfils the information needs or research goals or
not.
PART 2: CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF THE PRIMARY RESEARCH
a. Methodology:
i. Clarity of research question: In the qualitative study done by Orri et al. (2014), clarity of
focus as it had a clear statement of aim or research question. The aim of the study was to
evaluate the perspective of those adolescents who have engaged in suicidal attempts. The
intention was to provide clinicians with necessary information that they can use while
caring for youths with suicidal behaviour. The use of qualitative methodology was
appropriate for the study because the researcher wanted to interpret experiences of
research participants related to suicidal attempts and qualitative research uses interpretive
method to explore opinions or views of participants related to the phenomenon of
interest. Qualitative research design has significant value in assessing the lived

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experience and it is suitable when information of beliefs, attitude or preferences is needed
(Hammarberg, Kirkman & de Lacey, 2016).
ii. Setting and sample recruitment strategy: The study was conducted in two local hospitals and
one psychiatric hospital. All the physicians or psychologists at these hospitals were contacted
and inquired if they had adolescent patients with suicide attempts. The subjects were chosen only
if they had attempted at least one suicide during adolescence or post adolescent period. Another
inclusion criterion was that all participants must be within 15-25 years. The eligible participants
were recruited only when they received complete information about research and gave informed
consent for research. The study included adolescents with single and multiple suicide attempts.
Orri et al. (2014) explained the reason for selecting the above sample group. The rationale was
that this would enable inclusion of heterogeneous and diverse sample group. This would favour
analysis of various situation and experiences. According to Gentles et al. (2015), selection of
diverse and heterogeneous sample is likely to enhance the credibility and generalizability of the
findings as such samples will be example of most representative sample. The authors gave
overview of two individuals who refused taking part in the research. Overall, the recruitment
strategy was appropriate as purposive sampling favoured taking sample characteristics as per the
research objective (Etikan, Musa & Alkassim, 2016).
iii. Data collection/analysis: The research was conducted in two local general hospitals which
had inpatient and outpatient adolescent psychiatric department and one psychiatric hospital in
north-eastern Italy. The use of these settings is justified as more number of youths with mental
illness and suicide attempts is likely to come in these settings. Moreover, data was collected
through 16 individual semi-structure face-to-face interviews. Completeness in reporting of data
collection method was found as the researchers justified why semi-structured interview method