Dr. Jodi Frey, Professor, and colleagues, including former UMSSW faculty member, Dr. Philip Osteen have a new paper published in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior that explores outcomes from suicide training for law enforcement officers.
They hypothesized that participating in the online QPR Training for Law Enforcement Officers would be associated with improved knowledge about suicide, attitudes to suicide and suicide intervention, and self-efficacy. Additionally, we hypothesized that these outcomes would be associated with greater use of intervention skills when encountering individuals at risk for suicide in the community.
Results of our longitudinal analysis find that most of the participating officers reported some prior training and yet demonstrated statistically significant improvements in knowledge and attitudes after controlling for previous training. We conclude by suggesting that there is substantial need for increased training and offering possible conceptual and empirical explanations for the observed results.