Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Injury is the leading cause of death and disability among Canadians and kills more children and youth than all other causes combined. Physical injuries are said to display distinctive behavioural patterns so are believed to be potentially predictable and preventable. In the case of intentional injures, as opposed to unintentional injuries, the prediction of such patterns is not as straightforward. Intentional injuries turn on more intrapsychic and interpersonal matters. To address this difference, data was drawn from the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program to identify whether intentional and unintentional injuries were reported differently. A pilot-project involving children who were injured in 2004, and whose injuries led to a hospital visit, successfully identified category differentiating linguistic indicators. A subsequent analysis extended the pilot's findings with 2001 to 2003 data and included data on: a) the effectiveness of an evolving glossary of injury event linguistic indicators associated with the standard hospital injury intent codes; b) an inter-rater reliability check that helped identify that raters blind to the hospital intent code can sort injury cases into matching categories; and c) a factor analysis of the linguistic indicators per injury type. This poster will broaden the earlier findings by including data from an exploratory behavioural analysis that includes a preliminary categorical inventory of the proxemics observed between the injured child and the concerned other (parent or caregiver).