Document Type
Capstone Experience
Graduation Date
8-2026
Degree Name
Master of Public Health
Department
Biostatistics
First Committee Member
Lynette Smith, PhD
Abstract
The original study (Verlenden et al., 2024) aims to analyze how various protective factors may buffer poor mental health and suicide risk outcomes among US students in grades 9-12, an important public health topic as suicide is one of the leading causes of death among US teens (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024a). Through studying these associations, this study aims to uncover pathways to positive mental health outcomes and reduced suicide risk. The study utilizes the 2023 YRBS dataset, a nationally representative sample of US public and private school students in grades 9-12, to estimate prevalence of four mental health and suicide risk indicators. They further look at six selected protective factors from this dataset and estimate adjusted prevalence ratios of each outcome of interest by protective factor. Study results show that the overall prevalence of mental health and suicide risk outcomes is high for US teens, and higher for certain demographic groups such as females and LGBQ+ youth. The protective factors were seen to have an overall beneficial effect on reducing poor mental health and suicide risk in the study population. The pure replication aims to follow the described methods using R statistical software to reproduce the original study results. The measurement and estimation analysis (MEA) aims to demonstrate robustness of original results and interpretations by recreating the original study tables and figures with several recoded variables and comparing these to original results. The theory of change analysis (TCA) extends the original study by further analyzing school connectedness and suicide risk outcomes by sexual identity subgroup. Results suggest that school connectedness may have varying impacts on heterosexual and LGBQ+ students and reinforce the importance of school connectedness and the necessity for targeted inclusion of minority student groups in school connectedness intervention planning.
Rights
The author holds the copyright to this work and any reuse or permissions must be obtained from the author directly.
Recommended Citation
Baiyor, Hannah, "A Replication Study - Mental Health and Suicide Risk Among High School Students and Protective Factors — Youth Risk Behavior Survey, United States, 2023" (2026). Capstone Experience: Master of Public Health. 436.
https://digitalcommons.unmc.edu/coph_slce/436