Reliability-screened documentation indicators in forensic suicide narratives: A framework-evaluation study.

OBJECTIVE

Retrospective forensic and psychological autopsy materials are central to suicide research, but they are shaped by source availability, recall, retrospective meaning-making, investigative priorities, and documentation practices. Rather than developing a suicide risk model or clinical subtype classification, this study examined whether forensic suicide narratives could be transformed into a reliability-screened documentation matrix without treating documented content as verified occurrence, causal evidence, or individual-level risk information.

METHOD: We conducted a retrospective forensic-record framework-evaluation study of 152 anonymized suicide death cases examined in a regional forensic branch in Türkiye between April 2021 and March 2025. Fourteen predefined clinical, psychosocial, interpersonal, and contextual documentation indicators were coded using conservative documented-presence criteria. Interrater reliability, appraisal-dependency assessment, pairwise co-documentation analysis, and a final latent class summary were used to evaluate reproducibility, empirical separability, and record-level documentation configurations.

RESULTS

Eight indicators met the predefined κ ≥ .60 pragmatic documented-presence reliability threshold and were retained as primary direct documentation indicators. Two appraisal-dependent indicators were frequently documented but showed poor reliability. Pairwise analysis identified near-redundant co-documentation between interpersonal or relationship crisis and family or partner conflict, supporting their collapse into a single relational-documentation indicator. The final seven-indicator latent class analysis supported a parsimonious two-class documentation-configuration summary, interpreted descriptively rather than as clinical subtypes or risk profiles.

CONCLUSIONS

Forensic suicide narratives can be transformed into auditable documentation-level data when direct documentation, appraisal-dependent reconstruction, insufficient documentation, and operationally overlapping indicators are kept analytically distinct. This framework strengthens evidentiary discipline in retrospective forensic suicide research before broader pattern analysis.