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Comment by d1sxeyes | Hacker News Reader

> This research was limited by its all-male, predominantly White sample and its reliance on self-reported data. Additionally, the quality of emotional support and its impacts on well-being were not assessed.

So: we don’t know if it’s just men, we don’t know if it’s true for all ethnicities or just white men, it’s a reduction from two to one, I don’t mean to be dismissive, but someone got funding for this?

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Of course, "Further research is required." ;-)

More telling, "This study utilized a unique longitudinal dataset drawn from a sample of 235 men who were originally recruited as Harvard University students between 1939 and 1942."

Middle-aged white men have long had the highest suicide rates, so that may explain the narrow focus.

> predominantly White

So, the ones that commit suicide at the highest rate. But I agree, this is not a good study and little if any meaningful information comes from it. Perhaps its failure can bolster some actual research into the issue?

That's basically the critique that some weigh against huge swathes of psychology-adjacent research (among other domains), but is quite hard to overcome in practice, so money keeps flowing because its the established norm and because many people would rather have low-confidence pseudoscientific insights than no "scientific" insights at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

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