Testing theory

Durkheim and suicide

First, before Durkheim could attempt to test his theory about suicide, he needed to define his terms, or ‘conceptualize’ suicide:

“The term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.”

It may sound pretty sterile or simplistic, but Durkheim needed a definition that would allow him to collect data, and that meant that he needed a definition somewhat consistent with the way death records were kept. Simplistic though it may seem now, Durkheim was not naive about suicide and its causes. His research led him to identify four different types of suicide:

Types identified by Durkheim:

• egoistic (lack of social integration)
• altruistic (too much social integration—military cases most common)
• anomic (social regulation—institutional inability to provide what individuals need)
• fatalistic (hopeless situations)

Durkheim classified some suicides as resulting from ‘insanity’ of the individual. Potential causes such as alcoholism he ruled out, having found no correlation between the incidence of alcoholism and that of suicide rates. However, Durkheim believed that though mental illness may indeed be a cause of suicide, not all people who experience mental illness commit suicide. There must be something else going on. Which are predisposed?

What causes differences in suicide rates?

Durkheim had his short list of ‘social facts’ he thought were important in explaining the external factors that could increase the likelihood of suicide: Occupation, religion, marital status. Basically, those statuses that were associated with individualism were those Durkheim believed worthy of testing as variables that might explain suicide rates. Married individuals were less likely than single or divorced individuals to commit suicide. Protestants were more likely than Catholics to commit suicide (and to be divorced).

Testing theory

Durkheim conducted multiple tests around the hypothesis that ‘a higher rate of individualism in a social group causes a higher rate of suicide in that group.’ Looking for relevant measures of individualism, he would test for instance the role of religion and types of religion (Protestant/Catholic/Athiest), and he would also conduct tests in different countries, suggesting conditions in different countries might lead to different possible explanations for suicide. One’s occupation could also make him more susceptible to suicide. As for women ….. Durkheim was curiously unconcerned with whether gender was an important variable:

Further, we have seen that in all the countries of the world women commit suicide much less than men. They are also much less educated. Fundamentally traditionalist by nature, they govern their conduct by fixed beliefs and have no great intellectual needs (p. 121).

Maybe it is not surprising that Durkheim missed the boat here. He was part of a social system that clearly privileged men, and white men at that. That means his views are pretty Eurocentric as well (do we imagine that a farming village in Africa would lend itself to the same kind of study of suicide?), and even within Europe, back to the white men overrepresentation in theorizing.

So he missed gender, but Durkheim did identify several key variables, and if he wanted to actually test their power in explaining suicide, he needed to be able to measure them. He also needed statistical means to compare different rates. Questions of validity are harder to assess. In other words, was Durkheim measuring individualism by using religion (Catholics vs Protestants vs Jews) or marital status? How do we know protestants are more individualistic than Catholics? Is this simply a group characteristic (in other words, can we say much about any individual, or simply that Protestants are more likely to be influenced by individualism than Catholics?).

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Etic vs Emic

In trying to understand people, the accounts they give, and what’s going on theoretically, anthropologists have coined the terms ’emic’ and ‘etic’ to refer to different ways of knowing about the world. An ’emic’ account is taken from individuals. For instance, if I wanted to do field work on the Dogon Tribe in Mali, West Africa, I would live among them, learn their language, and use their own accounts to make inferences. However, I might have some theoretical questions as well, questions that the Dogons themselves might not consider important in making sense of their lives. For instance, their understanding of globalization might not be informed by what a scholar might know about the historical process of globalization. They might have noticed that there are more goods available, that some of these goods supposedly come from other places in the world, that some policies that affect them (like financial austerity leading to devaluing of their currency) may be related to other powerful countries. They may have even noticed some subtle and some not-so-subtle pressures to consider converting from their traditional religious and spiritual beliefs to more mainstream Islam, which exists in many parts of Mali. But the researcher has a more solid grounding to try to put changes in Dogon culture within the context of globalization. S/he can create an ‘etic‘ account, as well as understand their lives from an ‘emic‘ account. Both are necessary for painting any kind of representative picture.

Sociologist Jack Douglas wrote a book titled ‘The Social Meanings of Suicide’ in 1967. In some ways it serves as a critique of some of the ideas of Durkheim, though Douglas certainly understood that Durkheim was operating in a different century, breaking ground in a new social science discipline, with few peers to bounce ideas off of. But Douglas pointed out that Durkheim’s view of suicide was somewhat mechanical, ironically. He asked for instance how social scientists can explain the social world without the actors’ perspectives (the ’emic’ account)? What does suicide mean? Did he jump, or was she pushed? Other issues:

• Is Durkheim’s explanation of suicide any more persuasive than others? He certainly believed that having a method of testing his ideas provided a degree of legitimacy lacking in other accounts.
• Do suicide statistics represent reliable and/or objective data? Durkheim had to work with what was available. But to what extent might for instance Catholics try to hide suicide as a cause of death (as it is a mortal sin for Catholics)? What constitutes suicide and who decides—coroners, detectives, police officers? Wrote Douglas:

“Suicide, far from being a ‘social fact’, is instead very much the product of meaningful categorisation by officials investigating certain kinds of acts, and it cannot be assumed that these officials share the same meanings on which they base their interpretations. Officials, no less than other members of society, necessarily operate with their respective stocks of common-sense knowledge which they cannot help but use to make sense of the reality which they encounter – in this case, suspicious death.”

If Durkheim were alive today, there’s little doubt he would have taken advantage of research into clinical depression and brain chemistry as contributors to suicide. Other cultural factors seem to explain some suicides, such as sociologist David Phillips research into ‘copycat’ suicides. Age clearly can make a difference. There are states, such as Oregon, that have passed ‘Death with Dignity‘ laws protecting decisions of terminally ill (and mentally competent) individuals to end their lives. The point being, Durkheim would still be looking for ‘social facts’ to explain suicide today, and likely content that yes, mental illness exists, but not all who are clinically depressed (for instance) commit suicide, and we should look for other, mostly external factors to explain why some within that group choose to take their lives, while most don’t. What are, in other words, the ‘risk factors?’

• Jack Douglas. 1967. The Social Meanings of Suicide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Phillips, David P. 1982. The Impact of Fictional Television Stories on U.S. Adult Fatalities: New Evidence on the Effect of the Mass Media on Violence”. The American Journal of Sociology 87 (6): 1340–59.