Big five personality, emotional instability, and friendship quality as predictors of suicidality

Abstract

Suicide has been a recurrent problem among young persons all over the world, including Nigeria. The current study, therefore, examined some factors contributing to suicidality particularly big five personality, emotional instability, and friendship quality. A cross-sectional survey design was utilized and a sample of 496 Nigerian youths (mean age = 26.54 years, SD = 5.26) were used for the study. Five hypotheses were postulated and tested and the result from the first hypothesis showed that there was a significant positive relationship between big five personality and emotional instability, big five personality, and suicidality, negative relationship between emotional instability and friendship quality, positive relationship between emotional instability and suicidality and negative relationship between best friendship quality and suicidality. The result from the second hypothesis showed that the big five personality traits jointly influence suicidality. Independently, only agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience influenced suicidality with neuroticism being the highest predictor, but extraversion did not influence suicidality. From the third hypothesis, it was found that emotional instability significantly influenced suicidality. Furthermore, only closeness negatively influence suicidality while safety, acceptance, and help did not influence suicidality. The result further s howed that big five personality traits, emotional instability, and friendship quality significantly and jointly influenced suicidality. Incidental findings further showed that there was no significant interactive effect of gender, marital status, and relig ion on suicidality among youths. On the other hand, participants who are Islam significantly scored higher on suicidality than their Christian counterparts. Recommendations were highlighted for clinicians and suggestions for future studies were made.