ARISE
(Content Warning: self-harm, suicide attempts)
I was a data analyst for the ARISE study that investigates young people’s relationship to suicide and self-harm.
Study Overview
This study follows young people’s daily emotional experiences and their coping strategies to understand their relationship to suicide and self-harm.
As a research assistant, I cleaned and explored qualitative and qualitative data. I wrote R scripts and created visualizations to illustrate noteworthy relationships in the data.
Coding Interviews
I listened to participants’ intake interviews and coded their suicide experiences as aborted, interrupted, and successful (though not lethal).
This was an intense experience because of the content of the study. I learned about study design and how to transfer qualitative data into a quantitative format.
Writing R Scripts
I took the lead on writing R scripts to clean data and create relevant data points. For example, I consolidated data to document how many times participants engaged in self harm total, and how recently. I also found the age that participants started self-harming, and if they were currently receiving treatment.
Visualizations
I reported my findings by creating several graphs of data. On the left is a graph of the number of days of self harm by participants vs. the age they first attempted suicide.
My work laid the groundwork for my team to understand attributes of the participant group and prepare to investigate deeper questions.
Reflection
Contributing to this study was a positive experience for me because I had an opportunity to apply my skills writing in R.
I was an asset on this project because of my proficiency in R. I gained skills in writing code without explicit specifications, only verbal instructions. I also helped my research team write and debug their own code, explaining key programming concepts like functions and dictionaries.
One improvement I could have done would be polishing my R scripts and seeking mentorship about the most concise ways to write code. Sometimes I troubleshooted issues in my code by adding extra steps to make the logic of the program more simple and explicit. This may have made my scripts longer and more cumbersome than they needed to be. It's important to have polished scripts because other people are going to read my code even after I leave the project. However, since this project, I have learned to write in Python, which is a more concise language for writing functions. Now I am better at writing code that is “short and sweet”.