Revisiting Gender: A Quantitative Study of Self-Injury in Young Adults
type: CreativeWork
description: Non-suicidal self-injury is a prevalent and pressing public health concern, especially among young people. In recent decades, psychiatric research has greatly developed our understanding of the aetiology of self-injury and effective avenues for clinical intervention. However, the field has scarcely acknowledged the gender bias which pervades the self-injury literature – research has focused primarily on teenage girls and young women, at the exclusion of men and gender non-conforming people. In this dissertation, I revisit the topic of gender in self-injury research and use cross-sectional statistical analyses to address unanswered questions about gender similarities and differences in the prevalence, clinical severity, and functions of self-injury. I begin by introducing the study of self-injury and current understandings of how psychological distress, emotion dysregulation, and impulsivity contribute to the behaviour. Next, I discuss the gendered origins of our modern knowledge and present some of the gender- based assumptions that pervade the literature. This lays the foundation for subsequent chapters to investigate the aetiology of gender disparities in self-injury prevalence and characterise gender similarities and differences in self-injury presentation. I then present four quantitative studies across two community samples of young adults. The first study uses mediation and moderation analyses to test how self-reported psychological distress, emotion dysregulation, and impulsivity contribute to higher rates of self-injury among women than men. In the second study, these analyses are replicated in a second sample and extended to include gender non-conforming young adults, who report especially high rates of self-injury. The third study investigates whether gender differences in prevalence mirror differences in clinical severity by comparing groups on the reported addictive features of their self-injury, strength and intensity of urges, latency, and age of onset…
abstract: Non-suicidal self-injury is a prevalent and pressing public health concern, especially among young people. In recent decades, psychiatric research has greatly developed our understanding of the aetiology of self-injury and effective avenues for clinical intervention. However, the field has scarcely acknowledged the gender bias which pervades the self-injury literature – research has focused primarily on teenage girls and young women, at the exclusion of men and gender non-conforming people. In this dissertation, I revisit the topic of gender in self-injury research and use cross-sectional statistical analyses to address unanswered questions about gender similarities and differences in the prevalence, clinical severity, and functions of self-injury. I begin by introducing the study of self-injury and current understandings of how psychological distress, emotion dysregulation, and impulsivity contribute to the behaviour. Next, I discuss the gendered origins of our modern knowledge and present some of the gender- based assumptions that pervade the literature. This lays the foundation for subsequent chapters to investigate the aetiology of gender disparities in self-injury prevalence and characterise gender similarities and differences in self-injury presentation. I then present four quantitative studies across two community samples of young adults. The first study uses mediation and moderation analyses to test how self-reported psychological distress, emotion dysregulation, and impulsivity contribute to higher rates of self-injury among women than men. In the second study, these analyses are replicated in a second sample and extended to include gender non-conforming young adults, who report especially high rates of self-injury. The third study investigates whether gender differences in prevalence mirror differences in clinical severity by comparing groups on the reported addictive features of their self-injury, strength and intensity of urges, latency, and age of onset…
author: Lutz, Nina
language: eng
keywords: gender, LGBT, self-harm, self-injury
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4a6ba32e-f790-4369-846d-7434b696f92c/download
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
date published: 2022-12-01
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:25Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.96444