Assessing protective factors for non-suicidal self-injury: development of the barriers to self-injury inventory.

This study had two objectives: 1) To investigate reasons that an individual with a history of NSSI might refrain from NSSI and 2) to developed a measure (the Barriers to Self-Injury Inventory) to assess these barriers. In Study One, I used qualitative methods to elucidate motivations and situations that might prevent or dissuade an individual from engaging in NSSI. The reasons generated in Study One were combined to create an initial inventory of 115 items. In Study Two, this inventory was administered to 197 individuals with a history of NSSI. After confirming the dimensionality of the subscales and eliminating ill-fitting items, the refined measure consisted of 68 items, with 11 subscales and 3 super-ordinate scales. Subscales demonstrated acceptable reliability. Further, the scales demonstrate adequate convergent validity (i.e. positively correlated with coping, treatment engagement and reasons for living) and divergent validity (i.e. uncorrelated with suicidal behaviour).