ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychopathology
Persistently ambiguous: a taxometric investigation on two groups of suicidal ideation indicators
Lucas de Francisco Carvalho 1
Gisele Magarotto Machado 2,3
Giselle Pianowski 1
Nelson Hauck-Filho 1
Makilim Nunes Baptista 4
Cato Grønnerød 5
1. Universidade de Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
2. Division of Mental Health Services, R&D Department, Akershus University Hospital, Lørenskog, Norway
3. PROMENTA Research Center, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
4. Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil
5. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract
We performed a taxometric investigation into the underlying structure of suicidal ideation in two diverse samples of nonclinical adult populations. We relied upon one sample of 547 individuals, aged 18 to 78, who responded to the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation (BSS), and one sample of 989 participants aged 18 to 64 who responded to the Suicidal Ideation Attributes Scale (SIDAS). We analyzed the data using different taxometric techniques: MAMBAC, MAXEIG, and L-Mode. Our findings suggest ambiguity in the suicidal ideation latent structure (Mean CCFI BSS dataset = 0.46; Mean CCFI SIDAS dataset = 0.45) the results neither indicate any clear tendency towards taxonicity nor towards dimensionality. We discuss them based on the possibility that suicidal ideation may represent a complex construct encompassing multiple components.
Summary
Keywords
Mental Disorders, Psychopathology, Public Health, risk behavior, self-harm
Received
21 October 2025
Accepted
04 February 2026
Copyright
© 2026 de Francisco Carvalho, Magarotto Machado, Pianowski, Hauck-Filho, Nunes Baptista and Grønnerød. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Cato Grønnerød
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.