Vulnerability and Protective Factors Associated With Suicidal Behaviour in Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Observational Network Analysis Study

Abstract

Background: Suicidal behaviour (SB) in adolescents constitutes a major public health priority. Contemporary theoretical models, such as the Integrated Motivational– Volitional Model, emphasise the role of defeat and entrapment in the emergence of suicidal ideation. However, most studies have examined vulnerability and protective factors in isolation. The present study uses psychometric network analysis to examine how defeat, entrapment, emotion regulation, bullying and cyberbullying victimisation (CBV), resilience, reasons for living (RFL), and SB are structurally related among adolescents.

Methods: A cross-sectional observational study was conducted using non-probabilistic convenience sampling. The final sample comprised 1145 adolescents and young people aged 12–21 years (mean [M] = 15.46; standard deviation [SD] = 2.16), recruited from public, state-subsidised private, private, and other collaborating settings across Madrid, Salamanca, Granada, Cádiz, Seville, and Toledo. Participants completed measures of resilience, RFL, defeat, internal and external entrapment (EE), bullying and CBV, life satisfaction, cognitive emotion regulation, and SB. After prespecified data-quality screening, residual missing values were handled using multiple imputation. Descriptive, reliability, and correlational analyses were conducted in IBM SPSS Statistics, version 31, and the prespecified Extended Bayesian Information Criterion model selection (EBICglasso) network was estimated in R, version 4.3.1.

Results: The network appears to be primarily organised around a motivational core comprising defeat and entrapment. The strongest regularised partial association was observed between internal entrapment (IE) and EE (weight [w] = 0.546), followed by the connections between defeat and both EE (w = 0.304) and IE (w = 0.290). SB was directly associated with defeat (w = 0.142), EE (w = 0.125), and RFL (w = −0.215). Defeat emerged as the node with the highest strength (strength = 1.508), followed by EE (strength = 1.196), resilience (strength = 0.995), and IE (strength = 0.968). Regarding bridge indices, defeat exhibited the highest bridge strength (1.508), followed by resilience (0.995), RFL (0.709), and EE (0.651).

Conclusions: The findings suggest that adolescent SB is embedded in a network in which defeat and entrapment show substantial structural relevance, whereas RFL and resilience appear as protective resources. Resilience showed both high strength and bridge strength, indicating connectivity across several construct communities rather than causal or mediational effects. These results support the hypothesis-generating value of network analysis and highlight resilience, adaptive emotion regulation, and RFL as potential targets for preventive research and intervention.