Timeframe
2014-2017
Funding
Waka Hourua – Te Rā o Te Waka Hourua
COMPASS staff
Roy Lay-Yee
Martin von Randow
Collaborators
Hibiscus Research Limited
Jemaima Tiatia-Seath
Description
The primary aim of this project, led by Jemaima Tiatia-Seath of Hibiscus Research Limited and the University of Auckland, was to engage Pacific communities in examining appropriate and effective components for inclusion in Pacific suicide postvention activities, and in the development of Pacific suicide postvention guidelines.
COMPASS’s role was to administer and analyse two surveys:
- A community-focused survey of Pacific people in families that had lost a loved one to suicide; and
- A service-focused survey of professionals involved in providing support to Pacific families that had lost a loved one to suicide.
The participant base grew by word-of-mouth (snowball sampling). A total of 173 individuals completed the community survey and 70 providers completed the service survey. The project also involved focus group research including a further 74 Pacific peoples that had been impacted by suicide.
The project report can be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20210210001224/http://wakahourua.co.nz/oldsite/sites/default/files/Hibiscus%20Research%20-%20Pacific%20Suicide%20Postvention%20Final%20Report%20(Tiatia-Seath)_0.pdf.
Accompanying these surveys was an analysis of hospital records from the Ministry of Health for the years 1996–2013, to examine the morbidity and mortality of Pacific Peoples in New Zealand with a cause of death specified as “intentional self-harm”. These data were analysed for each year, by more detailed categories of causes of death, and by ethnicity and other demographic variables. Specifically, rates observed for Pacific Peoples were compared to those for the whole New Zealand population.