ABSTRACT

The Nonsuicidal self-injury beliefs scale was developed to understand the causes and purposes of self-injury behavior which would be difficult to explain by existing self-injury scales. Any non-suicidal acts of the older adult could be serious because they might result in suicide, but most of them have been likely to be concealed due to the characteristics of the older adults themselves, and there are few studies on self-harm in older adults Korea. The purpose of this study was to confirm the validity of the Korean version of nonsuicidal self-injury beliefs scale (NSIBS) for the older adults. The factors of the NSIBS, consisting of 39 items, were identified and verified by 298 data of either sexagenarian or septuagenarian adults who were pool of an online survey company. The major findings of this study are as follows. First, the Korean version of the NSIBS for the older adults were identified as 9 factors consisting of 38 questions and the reliability was .94. Second, it was found that the emotional dysregulation scale (DERS), interpersonal needs questionnaire (INQ), self-injury behavior scale(SHI), depression (CES-D), and anxiety (STAI) were significantly correlated with the NSIBS fulfilling the convergent and discriminatory validity criteria. Third, when controlling some demographic variables (e.g., gender, age) and some psychological variables (e.g., emotional dysregulation, interpersonal desire, depression, anxiety), additionally explanatory power of self-injury behavior were significant and incremental validity was verified. The findings suggest that the Korean version of NSIBS would be a suitable tool to evaluate the self-injury beliefs of the older adults and to understand the bases of the non-suicidal beliefs of them. Furthermore, it could be a treatment and intervention means for preventing suicide to explore the beliefs or the bases of the beliefs. Since the bases of self-harm and suicide for the older adults are complicatedly interrelated with various psychosocial factors, it is necessary to explore or confirm what factors are mediated by non-suicide beliefs in the process of influencing self-harm behavior in the following study.