It has been established by previous studies that suicide is more acceptable for some people than it is for others, and the main objective of the present study was to investigate the relationship between attitudes toward suicidal behavior and the suicidal person's socioeconomic status. Swedish university students read one of eight manipulated case stories in which a person engages in suicidal behavior and then completed the Suicide Attitudes and Attribution Scale (SAAS), which was constructed for this occasion. The data measured six factors, which also served as dependent variables in ANOVAs. Some of the results indicate that the suicidal behavior of an individual of high socioeconomic status is viewed more negatively than the same behavior displayed by an unemployed individual in a social welfare program.
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