Russian Version of the Inventory of Motivations for Suicide Attempts: Validation in a Clinical Sample of Adolescents

Understanding the motives for suicide attempts is a necessary condition of suicide risk assessment in adolescents. However, there is a lack of measures in Russian that assess these motives, particularly, in adolescent populations. The Inventory of Motivations for Suicide Attempts (IMSA) measures a variety of theoretically grounded intrapersonal and interpersonal motives and can be used in adolescent samples.

To validate the Russian version of the IMSA in a clinical sample of adolescents with suicidal behavior.

The Russian-language adaptation of the IMSA was conducted on a clinical sample of 522 inpatient adolescents 12-17 years old (M=14.51±1.52), including 425 girls and 97 boys. All the adolescents were hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital due to a suicide attempt, suicidal intentions, or a history of suicide attempts. To test the convergent and discriminative validity of the Russian version of the IMSA, the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire, Interpersonal Sensitivity Measure and Self-Concept Clarity Scale were used.

Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the original 10-factor structure did not have a good fit. After modifications and removal of 12 items an 8-factor structure emerged, which had the following scales: Hopelessness, Psychache, Escape, Burdensomeness, Low belongingness, Fearlessness, Problem-solving, Interpersonal motivations. A generalizing Intrapersonal motivations scale was also defined. The fit measures for the final model were as follows: χ²(df)=1,757.23(808); CFI=0.911; RMSEA=0.053 (p=0.087); SRMR=0.058. All the scales in the Russian version of the IMSA displayed satisfactory internal (above 0.8 except for Problem-solving) and retest reliability (above 0.6 except for Interpersonal motivations) and statistically significant positive correlations with scales from the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire and Interpersonal Sensitivity Measure and negative correlations with Self-Concept Clarity Scale.

The IMSA displayed satisfactory psychometric properties in a Russian adolescent inpatient sample and can be used to differentiate between the motives for suicide attempts in adolescents.