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Text mining analysis of teachers’ reports on student suicide in South Korea

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Abstract

A teacher as a suicide prevention gatekeeper has an important role in identifying suicide risks and warning signs in students. After a student’s suicide, teachers in Korea have to write a student suicide case report based on their direct and indirect observations. In particular, the section ’characteristic of student suicide’ of this report contains valuable information about the suicide; however, it is unstructured, and thus cannot be analyzed using conventional statistical methods. We aimed to identify the characteristics of observed Korean students, who have committed suicide, using text mining techniques as well as to improve our understanding of suicidal behaviors in the school contexts. Therefore, a series of text mining techniques: topic analysis, word correlation, and word frequency analysis, in three problem categories: health, school, and family problems, were used to analyze the characteristics of student suicides. Topic analysis showed that only 30% of the student suicide case reports identified problematic student characteristics related to suicide. Correlations between words showed that words in one problem category were often correlated with words in other problem categories. Frequency word analysis showed that the three problem categories varied across gender and school levels. These results provide interesting insights into the characteristics of suicides among Korean students and important implications for suicide intervention in the education field.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2015S1A5B8A02061201 and NRF-2016R1A6A3A11933734). We express our gratitude to the Korean Ministry of Education and Policy Research Team of Suicide and the Student Mental Health Institute assisting with data collection and organization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Suicide and School Mental Health Institute, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, 22 Gwanpyeong-ro 170 beon-gil, Dongan-gu, Anyang, 14068, South Korea

    KangWoo Lee

  2. Department of Psychiatry, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, 22 Gwanpyeong-ro 170 beon-gil, Dongan-gu, Anyang, 14068, South Korea

    Dayoung Lee & Hyun Ju Hong

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  1. KangWoo Lee
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Correspondence to Hyun Ju Hong.

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Ethical approval

Ethical approval to conduct this study was granted by the Institutional Review Board of Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital. The use of the student suicide case reports for this study was approved by the Korean Ministry of Education. Data were anonymized by removing personal identifying information such as student’s name and school name, and we extracted the student’s characteristics category for this study.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Lee, K., Lee, D. & Hong, H.J. Text mining analysis of teachers’ reports on student suicide in South Korea. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry 29, 453–465 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-019-01361-1

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