| Background: Suicide has been an alarming public health problem in China. China has the highest number of completed suicides in the world each year. About 42% suicidal deaths in the world have occurred in China, which has one-quarter of the world's population. Reports on suicide showed that suicide is closely associated with physical, psychological, and social factors. It is difficult to reconstruct the psychosocial factors of a completed suicidal, but the Psychological Autopsy maybe the only valid method to deal with this difficult problem.Psychological Autopsy, known as "a procedure for the reconstruction of suicidal death through interviews with survivors" has been employed in the West for suicide studies in the past four decades. It has been believed that Psychological Autopsy may be the best scientific approach to study the social and personal environments prior to the completed suicide. Studies in West have proved the methodology's reliability and validity.Suicide studies in China started much later than in the West, and most of the Chinese studies in the past 20 years have been of epidemiological method. Suicide studies using Psychological Autopsy are comparatively new in China, and there is lack of published evidence for the method's application in China, or its reliability and validity.Purpose: This thesis based on one of the very first Psychological Autopsy projects in China, studies the reliability and validity of the methodology, which fills the gap in the area of suicide studies in China. Using the data, I will assess the interview protocol, discuss the choice of informants, and comment on the integration of various data sources. All those issues have laid a solid foundation for future Psychological Autopsy projects to be held in China.Method: Based on the information provided by the Heath Administration of Jinzhou and Zhanghe County, Dalian, Liaoning province, our consecutive samplingyielded a total number of 66 completed suicides. For each suicide case, two informants were interviewed. Sixty-six age, gender, and location matched living individuals were selected as the community control group. For each control, two informants and the control him/herself were interviewed. The total number of interviews is 330. The protocol is a structured questionnaire which has the following major parts: Beck's Suicide Intent Scale (SIS), Duke Social Support Index(DSSI), Paykel's Interview for Recent Life Events(IRLE), HAM-D, The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (SCID), Personality Measurement (NEO-FF-I), The General Social Survey Attitudes towards Suicide (GSS), and CES-D.All the information is entered into the SPSS Database. The reliability and validity of major instruments are studied with SPSS11.0. Split-half reliability and Cronbach's Alpha value are used to examine the internal consistency for reliability test. And ICC via ANOVA and Generalized Kappa are used to estimate the inter-rater reliability. To study the validity of some instruments, we used the data from the control group. The community normal living controls provide "gold standard". We compare the responses from both the control him/herself and their informants. So the consistency test with ICC via ANOVA, Paired-Samples T Test and Bi-variate correlation are conducted to test the validity. The difference between each informant and control him/herself is as the dependent variable and the general situation of informants is as the independent variable. I conduct the linear regression (backward) analysis to investigate the validity affected by informants. With this result, the validity of measuring suicide group is to be discussed.Result: From the result of split-half and Alpha value, in the suicide, normal control, and the informants groups, there is high internal consistency in major instrument including SIS, DSSI, NEO-FF-I, HAM-D, and CES-D. Thus, the results show that the information from informants is reliable. From the results of inter-rater reliability, SIS. Social Interaction scale, Instrument Scale, NEO-FF-I, HAM-D...
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