“Discuss distinct sociological method adopted by Emile Durkheim in his study of ‘suicide’.” (2017)
Émile Durkheim‘s Suicide (1897) put into practice the programme of The Rules of Sociological Method (1895). By choosing the most individual of acts, he set out to prove that sociology has its own object, social facts, and its own scientific method, independent of psychology.
- Objective definition
Following the rule define phenomena by external characteristics, he set aside moral prenotions. Suicide is every death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result. The soldier’s sacrifice and the bankrupt’s despair thus become one comparable phenomenon.
- From act to rate
Individual motives are unknowable, but each society’s suicide rate is stable over years and differs sharply between societies. That stability reveals a collective force sui generis. The question becomes why rates vary between groups.
- Official statistics as indicators
He used published mortality statistics from several European countries, many compiled by Enrico Morselli, as objective indicators of unobservable realities: integration and regulation.
- Eliminating rival explanations
| Rival cause | Test | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Insanity | Rates by sex and religion | Women and Jews: high insanity, low suicide |
| Race and heredity | Rates by age and region within one stock | No consistent pattern |
| Climate and seasons | Monthly variation | Tracks intensity of social activity, not heat |
| Imitation (Gabriel Tarde) | Geographical maps | No radiation from centres; rates follow social boundaries |
- Comparative method and concomitant variation
He called concomitant variation, taken from John Stuart Mill, the instrument par excellence of sociology. Regular co-variation across many cases indicates causation:
- Protestants had higher rates than Catholics, and Catholics higher than Jews (religious integration).
- The unmarried had higher rates than the married, and rates were lower in larger families (domestic integration).
- Rates fell during wars and political crises (political integration).
- Rates rose in both crashes and booms, and with divorce (regulation).
- Multivariate logic
He guarded against spurious links. He compared Protestants and Catholics within the same province, separated the effect of marriage from age, and explained low Jewish rates despite high education by minority solidarity. This anticipated the “elaboration” logic later formalised by Paul Lazarsfeld.
- Aetiological typology
He classified suicides by cause, not outward form: egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic, derived from integration and regulation. This follows his rule that the determining cause of a social fact lies in antecedent social facts.
Critiques
- Jack D. Douglas (The Social Meanings of Suicide, 1967): statistics reflect how officials and families construct deaths, and integrated Catholic families may conceal suicides. J. Maxwell Atkinson (Discovering Suicide, 1978) showed coroners applying commonsense “suicidal biographies”.
- William S. Robinson (1950): the ecological fallacy, since group correlations cannot prove individual causes.
- Whitney Pope (Durkheim’s Suicide: A Classic Analyzed, 1976): selective data and crude comparisons.
- Durkheim imputes states of mind such as melancholy and “infinite desires”, breaching his own rule of externality.
- Steve Taylor (Durkheim and the Study of Suicide, 1982) defends him as a realist probing underlying structures, not a naïve positivist.
Contemporary relevance
India’s National Crime Records Bureau still tabulates suicides by occupation, marital status and “cause”, which is Durkheimian logic, and it inherits the same measurement problems. The Supreme Court’s National Task Force on student mental health recommended recording school and higher-education student suicides separately, so that the social pattern is not hidden.
Conclusion
Objective definition, rates as social facts, elimination of rivals, concomitant variation and a causal typology together founded quantitative sociology. Interpretivists rightly question the data, but Durkheim’s core move, explaining variation through social structure, remains the template.