Editorial Board:
Editor:
George H. Conklin,
 North Carolina
 Central University

Board:
Bob Davis,
 North Carolina
 Agricultural and
 Technical State
 University

Richard Dixon,
 UNC-Wilmington

Ken Land,
 Duke University

Miles Simpson,
 North Carolina
 Central University

Ron Wimberley,
 N.C. State University

Robert Wortham,
 North Carolina
 Central University

Editorial Assistants

Rob Tolliver,
 Duke University

Shannon O'Connor,
 North Carolina
 Central University

John W.M. Russell,
 Technical
 Consultant

® 

Volume 6, Number 1
Spring 2008
 
 

Sex and Suicide: A Cross-National Test of a Convergence Hypothesis*

by

Patrick Nolan

Kyle Irwin

Jennifer Triplett

Shannon McDonough

and

Emily Guerrero-Arnold
 

University of South Carolina

Introduction

    Durkheim has raised the eyebrows and ire of countless students in graduate theory courses with the apparently disparaging and demeaning statements and arguments he makes concerning women in his classic work, Suicide (Durkheim 1951 [1897]). The following quotes illustrate. 
 

• If she remains faithfully attached to religious traditions and thus finds ready protection against suicide, it is because these simple forms satisfy all her needs. Man, on the contrary…is a more complex social being…. (Durkheim 1951: 215-216).
• Women's sexual needs have less of a mental character, because, generally speaking, her mental life is less developed….Being a more instinctive creature than man, woman has only to follow her instincts to find calmness and peace  (Durkheim 1951: 272).
• Speaking generally, we now have the cause of that antagonism of the sexes which prevents marriage from favoring them equally: their interests are contrary; one needs restraint and the other liberty (Durkheim 1951: 274).

• As she lives outside of community existence more than man, she is less penetrated by it; society is less necessary to her because she is less impregnated with sociability (Durkheim 1951: 215). 
• It originates in the fact that the two sexes do not share equally in social life. Man is actively involved in it, while woman does little more than look on from a distance…(Durkheim 1951: : 385).
• To be sure, we have no reason to suppose that woman may ever be able to fulfill the same functions in society as man; but she will be able to play a part in society which, while peculiarly her own, may yet be more active and important than that of today (Durkheim 1951: 385).

    Taking his statements as a whole, it is clear that Durkheim is making either a primarily biological or a sociological argument.  Giving Durkheim the benefit of the doubt, we choose to treat it as the latter, and derive a testable hypothesis from it. Namely, that the more similar women's rates of participation in the paid labor force, politics, and the media, are with men's, the more similar should be their rates of suicide (1).

    Before doing our analysis, we first surveyed the existing literature on the topic. Although I was not optimistic concerning what we would find, given my earlier examination of the widespread uncritical "echo" of Durkheim's "finding" that Protestants have higher suicide rates than Catholics in introductory sociology textbooks (Nolan 2003)  (2).   But even I did not anticipate just how confused and confusing things were; and this in a discipline that aspires to be empirical and "scientific."

    Social scientists have paid a great deal of attention to differences between the sexes. Whether these differences are rooted in biology, or are socially constructed, is a topic of often heated debate, as the flap at Harvard University not long ago reminds us (3), but that there are important social, political, economic, and behavioral differences between men and women is beyond doubt or question (4). One of the most studied, has been their different propensities toward, and rates of, suicide. 

    Here is some of what we found in our review.

    In an early cross national study, Steven Stack (1983) found evidence that greater female equality, and higher levels of economic development, were associated with higher levels of suicide for women, and a relative convergence with the rates for men. Austin, Bologna, and Dodge (1992) found some evidence of gender role effects on suicide rates, but only for certain age groups and during certain time periods, and Danigelis and Pope (1979) found a strong effect of sex, with women showing a substantially lower tendency to kill themselves than men.  Danigelis and Pope did not, however, clearly show that the women in their study were less socially integrated than men.

    Girard (1993) explored an interdisciplinary theory that incorporated elements of role identities, economic development, and kinship institutions in order to account for different age-gender-suicide profiles across varying levels of social and economic development.  He concluded  that: 

Visual inspection of the data reveals that some Third World societies have distinctive patterns of suicide….Because current theoretical perspectives do little to illuminate age and gender patterns of suicide, this study examines an alternative approach and suggests new analytical tools that may prove fruitful in future studies (Girard 1993: 569).

    Other studies have produced similarly complex results. In a later longitudinal study, Stack (1987) divided the period from 1948 to 1989 into two eras, one, that was assumed to be more "traditional" (1948-1963) and another that was assumed to be more "emancipatory" (1964-1989).  He found that, in the first period, increases in female labor force participation were associated with an increase in male, female, and total suicide rates, but that there was no relationship between female labor force participation and female suicide, and there was a positive relationship with male and total suicide rates in the second period (Stack 1987). 

    Travato and Vos (1992) compared the effects of married women's labor force participation on suicide in two Canadian censuses. Their results indicated that it had positive effects on both sexes' rates in 1971, and negative effects in 1981. The former was inferred to be a result of "antipathy toward women's participation in the labor force," and the latter of its "widespread acceptance."

    In both cases these apparently contradictory (or unstable) results were speculated to be the result of a rapid and far-reaching if unobserved, unmeasured social attitudes and values. 

    In a much more comprehensive and sophisticated analysis, Pampel (1998) too found evidence of a strong contextual/period effect, but he finds a pattern more similar to that reported by Steffensmeier (1984) -- convergence followed by divergence (Pampel 1998). 

    Fernquist and Cutright (1998) argued that positive correlations between female labor force participation and both male and female suicide rates were evidence in support of Durkheim's theory of societal integration, if not convergence, but Cutright and Fernquist (2001) reported that changes in the male suicide rate did not affect, and changes in the female suicide rate only had a moderate effect, on male-to-female suicide ratios. 

    And, finally, Maris et al. (2000: Chapter 6) report that there is no evidence of convergence in suicide rates for men and women in the United States.

    In part because they overlap with studies of the effects of gender roles, attempts to assess the effects of "modernization" on suicide rates have produced similarly mixed results.  For example, Stack (1983) reports that increasing industrialization is associated with an increasing sex-differential in suicide rates, but Fernquist and Cutright (1998) and Steen and Mayer (2004), find no significant effect of modernization on suicide rates and the male to female suicide ratio. 

    The mixed, and, at times, contradictory evidence reported to date on the effects of changing gender roles, female participation in public social life, and "modernization" on suicide rates indicate that the question concerning the possible convergence or divergence of men's and women's rates of suicide is still very much open.

    So what do we know from consulting the literature?

    Perhaps, we thought, by examining the gender suicide ratio in a relatively large set of societies spanning a wide range of development levels, and by extending measures of women's participation beyond the simply economic to include other indicators of social and political participation, we could significantly extend our knowledge of this topic, and provide a better test of this sociological explanation of gender differences in suicide, and possibly partially rehabilitate Durkheim's scholarly image.  If the convergence hypothesis does not hold here, perhaps it is fatally flawed, overly simplistic, or perhaps there is no sociological explanation for gender differences in suicide. 

    Based on our interpretation of Durkheim's arguments regarding women's relatively low rates of participation in public life and their relatively low rates of suicide at the time he was writing, we propose to test the following hypothesis: The higher the level of women's social involvement in the public sphere, the more similar to men will be their rate of suicide. The dependent variable we will use to index this is the ratio of female-to-male suicide rates (5).  We expect that in those countries where female participation is higher, their rates of suicide will be more similar to those of men. Thus we are making no prediction concerning the general rate, or trend in the rate of suicide in societies, only that greater similarity in their rates of participation in the public sphere should be associated with greater similarity in their rates of suicide.

    Male and female suicide rates were taken from the World Health Organization (www.who.org), which reports rates of suicide by sex for 100 countries representing a wide range of levels of development, from India, Tajikistan, and Zimbabwe to Norway, Luxemburg, and the United States. While there are obvious limitations to such data (6),  the large number of countries we are able to examine and analyze will allow us to test the relationship over a relatively wide range of variation in development and in women's participation in public social life. Most previous quantitative research on these issues has focused on longitudinal comparisons within small sets of developed countries (e.g., Pampel 1998; Fernquist and Cutright 1998), or a single developing country (Steen and Mayer 2004). 

    Since the present study uses the latest suicide figures reported, and they range across a twenty-year span, 1980 to 2000, we have taken the average across this period for our independent variables. Not only will this better synchronize them in time, but it should also "smooth out" any volatility in our independent variables. 

    To make the test of our hypothesis as comprehensive as possible, we measure women's level of social involvement in several ways: their level of economic involvement, education, political offices held, and fertility. Economic involvement is indexed by female labor force participation, political involvement by the percentage of political offices held by women, education by female literacy rates and the percent of women in the labor force with a tertiary (college) education, and fertility by the average number of children (TFR).  While most of these are direct outcome measures of involvement, literacy and fertility rates are more indicators of the potential, or relative time and resources available for women's involvement in public social life. 

    We also use Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP/cap in real dollars) in our analysis as an overall indicator of "development" that may act as a proxy for aspects of social change or "modernization" not measured by the other indicators. All independent variables were taken from the World Bank Development Indicators Online (www.worldbank.org/data).

    Our design is cross-sectional in nature. Therefore, relationships between the dependent variable and independent variables represent those relationships at a specific time. Cross-sectional data analysis is usually offered with a warning label: "use great caution when drawing conclusions about change (Vogt 1993: 55)."  But while longitudinal research designs are better able to explore issues of causation and can more easily deal with problems of simultaneity or mutual-causation (7),  since our primary interest is in the convergence of male and female suicide across a very broad range of levels of development, which is not likely to be detected in trends for a relatively limited period of time or in a small set of societies occupying a very high and narrow band of the development/participation spectrum, a cross-sectional design is more appropriate. The issue of simultaneity or reverse causation is also not central to our question. Our primary goal is to determine if Durkheim's ideas regarding female participation and suicide rates are consistent with the evidence, not to determine if there might be a causal relationship between suicide and female participation, or female participation and suicide (8).  Although this might be a valid topic for future investigation, it begs the question we are examining here. 

    In fact, a cross-sectional design is actually more suitable for our purposes in that it allows us to use a relatively large number of countries arrayed across a relatively wide band of the development/participation spectrum (e.g., Girard 1993). For longitudinal studies, adequate data for each time point and for each country must be readily available. This, however, is not possible with regard to suicide. If nothing else, our cross-sectional design examining the relative rates for more than 90 countries representing a wide range of economic development and female participation, will complement studies more tightly focused on recent changes in relatively highly developed countries. 

    As Table 2 shows, when countries with higher than average levels of female participation (with respect to labor force participation, literacy, holding political office, fertility, and having a college education) (9)  are compared to countries with lower than average levels of female participation, of all five indicators, only female literacy is associated with a significant difference in the suicide ratio, and the difference is in the wrong direction. 

    The 41 countries with higher than average literacy actually have significantly lower suicide ratios (0.28 vs. 0.43), indicating that higher rates of female literacy are associated with a greater gender divergence in suicide rates. These preliminary bivariate results, clearly contradict the convergence hypothesis. 

    Combining all the indicators into a single OLS regression model produces the results displayed in Table 3. Since the relationship between suicide ratio and development (log Gross Domestic Product per capita) was found to be non-monotonic, a single term was constructed from the unstandardized regression coefficients for logGDP/cap and logGDP/cap from the complete model as follows:

This will allow the curvilinear (non-monotonic) effects of development on suicide ratio to be captured by a single predictor in the multiple regression model, with the standardized coefficient, for it, indicating the amount of variance explained by this functional form of development (e.g., see Jagodzinski and Weede 1981). We label the computed variable "development" in this table.

    The signs of the coefficients for this quadratic function indicate that the largely negative effect of development on suicide ratio reverses itself at a value of logGDP/Cap of about 3.83, or a GDP/cap of about $6,753 in the full model (10).  This suggests that there is some evidence of convergence, but only for the more highly developed countries, a finding we will discuss further below.

    Although the full model explains a substantial proportion of the variance in suicide ratio (Rsquare = .54), aside from development, only female literacy and development come close to statistical significance. While this lack of individual effects might be due to multicollinearity, regressing suicide ratio on each of the predictors individually (not shown here) produces very similar results. The quadratic of development has the same basic shape and is significant (p=0.016), and female literacy comes close to achieving statistical significance (p=.099) but again with a negative sign (b=-003), the opposite of that predicted by convergence; all the others are non-significant. The reversal point for the quadratic of development occurs at a slightly higher value than it did for the full model (logGDP/cap of 3.88, or a GDP/Cap of about $7517). The robustness and shape of this quadratic relationship suggests, perhaps, very qualified, if intriguing, support for the convergence hypothesis. 

    While the fact that, at some point, higher levels of development are associated with greater convergence in suicide rates, offers some support for the hypothesis, a number of other factors challenge and temper this support.  First, it is troubling that only one of the five specific indicators of female participation is significantly related to suicide ratio, and its relationship is opposite of that predicted. This finding suggests that, net of the curvilinear effects of development, greater rates of female literacy are associated with a greater divergence in women's and men's suicide rates. 

    Second, although the relationship between development and convergence becomes positive near the midpoint of the development range for this set of societies -- 46 are below, and 39 are above the inflection point -- the curve appears to have a decidedly “u-“ rather than a “j-shape.” (This may help to explain why the differences in suicide ratio means were so small in our initial comparisons.) For example, as Tables 4A and B show, if we divide our countries at the development inflection point, the mean suicide ratios in the two groups produced are virtually identical -- 0.33 for those below it, and 0.32 for those above it. And, although the polynomial is statistically significant, the explained variation for this model is quite modest: Rsquare = 0.066. 

    Thus, the most highly developed societies, with the greatest levels of women's involvement in the economic and political life of society in this set of societies, show no greater evidence of convergence than the least developed societies, with the lowest levels of participation. Despite the fundamental differences between women's roles and participation in the most, and least advanced or "modernized" societies, there is no clear evidence of differences in their levels of convergence in suicide rates. Gender differences in suicide rates are about the same for the two types of societies. Taken together with Maris et al.'s (2000) finding that there is no evidence of a trend toward convergence in male and female suicide rates in the United States, these findings strongly challenge the convergence hypothesis.

    Could we develop a plausible ad hoc explanation of these results that would save our hypothesis from falsification? Perhaps, but the most prudent conclusion is that the convergence hypothesis is unsupported; there is no convincing evidence of convergence in male and female suicide rates with increasing economic development, or the apparent convergence of gender roles and rates of participation in public social and political life. And, although there may be another sociological explanation for these diverse trends in suicide by gender (11) ,  the possibility that there is no simple or straightforward sociological explanation for the persisting gender gap in suicide cannot be ruled out (12) .

    Durkheim's Suicide has inspired a large, and growing, body of empirical research and thought.  But the results of these studies and thinking (only a sample of which has been discussed here) has produced a dizzying array of often contradictory results and seemingly ad hoc rationalizations and theory-rescues.  Perhaps, not surprisingly, given Durkheim's own hedging on the issue, nowhere is this more evident than in the macrosocial study of gender and suicide.  This research area has produced conflicting conclusions, where even the sign of relationships cannot be predicted with any degree confidence, and no cumulative results are in sight (13). 

    A major problem, with all social research, but especially with politically-charged and discipline-defining research, is that after the fact, one can always construct a (sociological) reason for, or rationalization of, the results.  In fact, the gravamen of Pope's (1976) argument, was that the complexities and ambiguities of Durkheim's original conceptualization of "types" of suicide, which caused such confusion and consternation among sociologists (e.g., Johnson 1965, Acevedo 2005), was itself a product of this.  And, as Gould (1978) demonstrated, our rationalizations can be so persuasive that even we (unconsciously) are taken in, or convinced, by them. 

    Heretical as it sounds, it may be time to follow Popper's method (2002), and to finally conclude -- not that its arguments work for men but not women, for women but not men, for the old but not the young, for the young but not the old, in this time period but not that, for rich societies but not poor, for poor societies but not rich, in this social climate but not that, but -- that Durkheim's theory and arguments about suicide have been falsified (14).   Our modest paper may only have added a small refutational straw to the body of evidence, but the camel was already heavily loaded. 

Acevedo, Gabriel A. 2005. "Turning Anomie on its Head: Fatalism as Durkheim's Concealed and Multidimensional Alienation Theory." Sociological Theory 23: 75-85. 

Austin, Roy, Marie Bologna, Hiroko Hayama Dodge. 1992. "Sex-Role Change, Anomie and Female Suicide: A Test of Alternative Durkheimian Explanations." Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 22 (2): 197-225. 

Breault, K. D. 1986. "Suicide in America: A Test of Durkheim's Theory of Religious and Family Integration," American Journal of Sociology 92: 628-656.

[The] Chronicle of Higher Education. 2005. "Women and Science: The Debate Goes On," March 4, 2005

Cohen, Jacob and Patricia Cohen. 1975. Applied Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Social Sciences. NY: Wiley.

Cutright, Phillips and Robert Fernquist. 2001. "The Relative Gender Gap in Suicide: Societal Integration, the Culture of Suicide, and Period Effects in 20 Developed Countries, 1955-1994." Social Science Research 30: 76-99.

Danigelis, Nick and Whitney Pope. 1979. "Durkheim's Theory of Suicide as Applied to the Family: An Empirical Test." Social Forces 57 (4): 1081-1106.

Davis, Richard A. 1981. "Female Labor Force Participation, Status Integration and Suicide, 1950-1969." Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 11 (2).

Durkheim, Emile. 1951 [1897]. Suicide. New York: Free Press.

Fernquist, Robert and Phillips Cutright. 1998. "Societal Integration and Age Standardized Suicide Rates in 21 Developed Countries, 1995-1989." Social Science Research 27:109-127. 

Girard, Chris. 1993. "Age, Gender, and Suicide: A Cross-National Analysis." American Sociological Review 58: 553-574. 

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1978. "Morton's Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity." Science 200: 503-509.

Hamilton, Richard. 1996. The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Jagodzinski, Wolfgang and Erich Weede. 1981. "Testing Curvilinear Propositions by Polynomial Regression with Particular Reference to the Interpretation of Standardized Solutions." Quality and Quantity 15: 447-463. 

Johnson, Barclay D. 1965. "Durkheim's One Cause of Suicide." American Sociological Review 30: 875-886.

Kushner, Howard. 1994. "Durkheim and the Immunity of Women to Suicide." Pp. 205-233 in David Lester (ed.) Emile Durkheim Le Suicide: 100 Years Later.  Philadelphia: The Charles Press.

_____ and Claire E. Sterk. 2005. "The Limits of Social Capital: Durkheim, Suicide, and Social Cohesion." American Journal of Public Health 95: 1139-1143.

Lehmann, Jennifer M. 1995. "Durkheim's Theories of Deviance and Suicide: A Feminist Reconsideration." American Journal of Sociology 100: 904-930.

Maris, Ronald W. 1981. Pathways to Suicide: A Survey of Self-Destructive Behaviors. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Maris, Ronald W., Alan L. Berman, and Morton M. Silverman. 2000. Comprehensive Textbook of Suicidology. NY: Guilford Press.

Newsweek. 1995. "The New Science of the Brain: Why Men and Women Think Differently." Cover feature March 27, 1995.

Nolan, Patrick D. 2003. "Questioning Textbook Truth: Suicide Rates and the Hawthorne  Effect." The American Sociologist 34: 107-116.

Pampel, Fred. 1998. "National Context, Social Change, and Sex Differences in Suicide Rates." American Sociological Review 63: 744-58.

Pope, Whitney. 1982 [1976]. Durkheim's Suicide: A Classic Reanalyzed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Popper, Karl Raimund. 2002. Conjectures and Refutation. NY: Routledge.

Stack, Steven. 1983. "The Effect of Religious Commitment on Suicide: A Cross-National Analysis." Journal of Health and Social Behavior 24: 362-74.

Stack, Steven. 1987. "The Effect of Female Participation in the Labor Force on Suicide: A Time Series Analysis, 1948-1980." Sociological Forum 2 (2): 257-77.

Steen, Della and Peter Mayer. 2004. "Modernization and the Male-Female Suicide Ratio in India 1967-1997: Divergence or Convergence?" Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 34 (2): 147-159. 

Steffensmeier, Renee Hoffman. 1984. "Suicide and the Contemporary Woman: Are Male and Female Suicide Rates Converging?" Sex Roles 10 (7/8): 613-631.

Timmermans, Stefan. 2005. "Suicide Determination and the Professional Authority of Medical Examiners." American Sociological Review 70: 311-333. 

Trovato, Frank, and Rita Vos. 1992. "Married Female Labor Force Participation and Suicide in Canada, 1971 and 1981."  Sociological Forum 7: 661-677.

Vogt, W. Paul. 1993. Dictionary of Statistics and Methodology: A Nontechnical Guide for the Social Sciences. London: Sage Publications. 

Wesson, Robert G. 1976. Why Marxism? The Continuing Success of a Failed Theory. NY: Basic Books.

*We thank Ron Maris for his thoughtful comments.  Please address all correspondence to Patrick Nolan, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 at <pnolan@sc.edu>.

(1) It should be noted that Durkheim leaves open the possibility that greater participation in social life may increase differences between men and women (e.g., Suicide 385-386).  As Pope (1982) cogently argued with regard to Suicide, even when Durkheim appears to be putting forward an eminently testable argument, on further examination, it often proves to be non-falsifiable. In the present case, both convergence and divergence in suicide rates could be seen as confirming Durkheim's arguments concerning gender and suicide (see also Nolan 2003: 113). We choose to focus on convergence, in part, because it is falsifiable, but also because we think it is the more sociological argument.    Return to Text

(2) For related cases where prominent theoretical arguments appear to be immune to falsifying evidence see Wesson (1976) and Hamilton (1996). Although more sociological examples could be cited, the problem is by no means restricted to sociology (e.g., see Nolan 2003).   Return to Text

(3) See, for example: "Women and Science: The Debate Goes On," The Chronicle of Higher Education (2005).   Return to Text

(4) Even popular (non-academic) magazines such as Newsweek (1995) have done cover stories on the differences.   Return to Text

(5) Since the male suicide rate is almost universally greater than that of females, in general, the larger the ratio, the closer to parity are the rates.  There are exceptions, however. In our "sample," for instance, for the 93 countries that we have the needed data for, one country China (Hong Kong) has a ratio greater than one (1.14), and Kuwait has a ratio of 1.0. Return to Text

(6) A limitation of all such data is the fact that, inevitably, some suicides are reported as homicides, accidents, or due to undetermined causes. While such reporting might in some instances stem from human error, the social stigma attached to self-killing is a likely cause of intentional mislabeling of suicides (Pampel 1998). Further, systems for gathering data on cause of death in developing countries may not be as advanced as those used in wealthy nations, and as Steen and Mayer (2004) point out national rates for developing nations necessarily conceal regional, age, and gender variation in suicide rates. Return to Text

(7) When relationships between variables are observed over a period of time, reverse causation can more easily be accounted for if it occurs. As a result, much of the quantitative research on Durkheim's notion of suicide and social change has used a longitudinal design (e.g., Breault 1986; Fernquist and Cutright 1998; Pampel 1998; Stack 1987; Steen and Mayer 2004).  Return to Text

(8) The fact that we are calculating and comparing the female-to-male ratios within countries, also greatly mitigates the fact that, as Steen and Mayer (2004) point out, national data for developing nations conceals regional, age, and gender differences in the suicide rate.   Return to Text

(9) Countries were sorted according to whether they were higher or lower than average for the entire "sample" for each independent variable. They were then compared to determine if differences in suicide ratio in these two sets of societies were statistically significant.  Return to Text

(10)The formula for determining the inflection point is: 

(-b*log GDP/Cap)/(2*blogGDP/capsquared)

(e.g., see Cohen and Cohen 1975: 214-222). In this model it is – (-5.951)/1.554.  Return to Text

(11) For example, women may attempt suicide as often as men (or their rate of attempt is converging with men), but they choose less lethal means and hence are less successful in killing themselves (Maris 1981), or although they now participate more frequently and intensely in public social life than they did in the past, they do this in addition to their traditional roles, and thus they are still (more) strongly protected by prophylactic domestic responsibilities/solidarity (e.g., they are more likely than men to maintain strong social ties with parents, siblings, children, and friends) Maris et al. (2000). Return to Text

(12) For instance, we may only be able to construct changing post hoc and ad hoc explanations of observed trends or differences in suicide (e.g., see Nolan 2003: 112-113). Return to Text

(13) To show just how tangled the web can get, Kushner and Sterk (2005) recently argued that Durkheim may have been right about suicide, but wrong about his own theory.  Women actually do act to kill themselves (unsuccessfully) more frequently than men, but the reason they do is because they are more socially integrated than men. Theirs is fatalistic suicide, and Durkheim may have failed to recognize its importance in modern societies because he focused so single-mindedly on completed suicides (Kushner and Sterk 2005: 1140-1141). Return to Text

(14) An alternative explanation for the dismal performance of the theory is bad data.  After a relatively lengthy discussion of problems in defining and measuring suicide, Durkheim essentially ignored the problem and accepted government tabulations. Nonetheless, its measurement continues to be problematic even in the most statistically sophisticated societies (e.g., see Timmermans 2005). It should be noted, however, that comparing the ratios of male and female rates within societies should mitigate, somewhat, cultural biases and other factors that complicate comparisons of rates across societies. 
 Return to Text

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©2008 by the North Carolina Sociological Association