Sociological View On Suicide

The interpretivists found criticisms of Durkheim as they stated he treated suicide as statistics of social facts when they should be seen as a social construct. They believed that statistics were interpreted by a number of people which did not make them reflective on the truth.
Other positivists such as Sainsbury (1995) and Gibbs and Martin (1964) predicted that in societies where there was little status integration, suicide rates will be higher; this backed up Durkheim’s view and made his research reliable, valid and also representive.

A view that opposes this is that of Douglas (1967) and Atkinson (1978), these were two interpretivists’ sociologists who looked more at the meaning of the act personally and provided more qualitative data. As an Interpretivist, Douglas rejected Durkheim’s categories of suicide and stated how each suicide case was as a result of different circumstances and could not be grouped as each case possesses a different meaning. He disagreed with the statistics and stated how they were the result of the coroners interpretation of the death and therefore many not be valid. Atkinson is mentioned in item A and he takes a different approach, as Atkinson believes that we can never truly be able to identify the rate of suicide and therefore analysis’s the way in which the coroner categorize the deaths through the use of qualitive methods and through the understanding of the term ethnomethodology, which is that social reality is a construct of it’s members.

Another view which apposes both of the above is one of a realist. Taylor argues statistics are

invalid as he discovered that the coroner took factors such a history of mental illness as a

high possibility that lead to the suicide which Taylor did not believe was right. He believed

no pattern could be found between suicides as each case is individual and can not be grouped to create statistics. He however tried to find the meanings that causes suicide and explained the reasons using four types, these were submissive suicide, where the person is certain about themselves- they feel no reason to go and are certain that they want to die. Thanatation suicides where the person is uncertain about themselves, this could mean that they are either uncertain about themselves or what others think of them and believe that chance will decide whether they should live or die; this suicide attempt is about risk taking. Sacrifice suicides is where the person is uncertain about others and know they have to kill themselves, this could be their way of communicating and they make seek to blame others for their death so they will suffer guilt. Finally, Appeal suicides which is where the person is uncertain about others as they doubt their importance to others and attempt suicide to resolve their uncertainty by causing others to change their behavior, this is seen as an act of despair and hope, by combining that they wish to die and wish things to change for the better. This study has many criticisms as it is unable to be proven if these are correct types and individual cases may be a combination of types but there is no real way of telling. This study is unable to be representable as only a small sample of case studies were used and the wider social structures were not taken into consideration.

From the three sociological approaches to suicide given it is easy to see that they are all critised by each other and they do possess some similar views such as Douglas and Taylor but they also have very different ways of approaching this study and prove that there is no real way of knowing which approach is the correct one but all approaches use useful methods to study suicide and are all valid in their own approach.