The Impact of Fictional Television Suicide Stories on U.S. Fatalities: A Replication

In 1982, Phillips published a paper on the effect of fictional television stories on adult fatalities (see SIEC #831128). This paper calls attention to an error in Phillip’s’s data which invalidates his results. Phillips had used newspaper summaries for soap opera suicide stories; in 8 of 13 cases this method misspecified the date of the event & thus invalidated the before-after analysis. This paper corrects this error & includes several stories that Phillips overlooked. (12 refs.)