Intervening on high-risk responses during ecological momentary assessment of suicidal thoughts: Is there an effect on study data?

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is increasingly used to study suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs). There is a potential ethical obligation for researchers to intervene when receiving information about suicidal thoughts in real time. A possible concern, however, is that intervening when receiving responses that indicate high risk for suicide during EMA research may impact how participants respond to questions about suicidal thoughts and thus affect the validity and integrity of collected data. We leveraged data from a study of adults and adolescents (N = 434) recruited during a hospital visit for STBs to examine whether monitoring and intervening on high-risk responses affects subsequent participant responding. Overall, we found mixed support for the notion that intervening on high-risk responses influences participants’ ratings. Although we observed some evidence of discontinuity in subsequent responses at the threshold used to trigger response-contingent interventions, it was not clear that such discontinuity was caused by the interventions; lower subsequent responses could be due to effective intervention, participant desire to not be contacted again, or regression to the mean. Importantly, the likelihood of completing surveys did not change from before to after response-contingent intervention. Adolescents were significantly more likely than adults, however, to change their initial suicidal intent ratings from above to below the high-risk threshold after viewing automated response-contingent pop-up messages. Studies explicitly designed to assess the potential impact of intervening on high-risk responses in real-time monitoring research are needed, as this will inform effective, scalable strategies for intervening during moments of high suicide risk.