Durkheim's examples of social facts included social institutions such as kinship and marriage, currency, language, religion, political organization, and all societal institutions we must account for in everyday interactions with other members of our societies. Deviating from the norms of such institutions makes the individual unacceptable or misfit in the group. Durkheim's discovery of social facts was significant because it promised to make it possible to study the behavior of entire societies, rather than just of particular individuals. Durkheim points to individual actions as instances or representations of different types of actions in society(Schmaus, Warren (1994). Durkheim's studies are graphic demonstrations of how careful the social researcher must be to …show more content…
98) and some social currents become expressed in different suicide rates – rates that differ among societies, and among different groups in society. Durkheim takes up the analysis of suicide in a very quantitative and statistical manner. Some of the factors that others had used to explain suicide were heredity, climate, race, individual psychopathic states (mental illness), and imitation. What Durkheim finds is that the factors associated with higher numbers of suicides must be those that relate to “the time when social life is at its height” (Suicide, p. 119). Note that Durkheim 's method here is very empirical, and he searches through various sorts of data and evidence to find factors associated with suicide. Durkheim argues that the most important aspects of social organization and collective life for explaining differences in suicide rates are the degree of integration into and regulation by society (Ritzer, p. 90). As Giddens notes (p. 83), degree of integration of family structure is related in the same way to suicides. The conclusion from all these facts is that the social suicide-rate can be explained only
Durkheim Emile Durkheim (1858 - 1917), believed individuals are determined by the society they live in because they share a moral reality that we have been socialised to internalise through social facts. Social facts according to Drukhiem are the “manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him [or her].” Social facts are external to the individual, they bind societies together because they have an emotional and moral hold on people, and are why we feel shame or guilt when we break societal convention. Durkheim was concerned with maintaining the cohesion of social structures. He was a functionalist, he believed each aspect of society contributes to society's stability and functioning as a whole.
Durkheim’s concept of social integration refers to social groups with well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals. These groups will differ in the degree to which individuals are part of the collective body, also to the extent to which the group is emphasized over the individual, and lastly the level to which the group is unified versus fragmented. Durkheim believed that two types of suicide, Egoistic and Altruistic, could stem from social integration. Egoistic suicide resulted from too little social integration. Those people who were not sufficiently bound to a social group would be left with little or no social support in times of crisis. This caused them to commit suicide more often. An example Durkheim discovered was that of unmarried people, especially males, who, with less to connect them to stable social groups, committed suicide at higher rates than married people. Altruistic suicide is a result of too much integration. It occurs at the opposite end of the social integration scale as egoistic suicide. Self sacrifice appears to be the driving force, where people are so involved with a social group that they lose sight of themselves and become more willing to take one for the team, even if this causes them to die. The most common cases of altruistic suicide occur to soldiers during times of war. Religious cults have also been a major source of altruistic suicide.
Emile Durkheim is a French sociologist who investigated suicide and the connection to society using the functionalist perspective. He talks about solidarity being a component of suicide. The less people that an individual has a connection to the more likely they are to consider taking their own life. Belonging to a social group can increase the sense of belonging that people have in their everyday life. Social stratification is a factor of whether someone feels like they belong in a group or not.
According to Durkheim, two types of suicide arise from the different levels social integration. One cause of suicide is extremely low social integration, which is referred to as egoistic suicide. Durkheim argues that this is the case because others give the individual’s life meaning, so without this support from the group the person may feel hopeless (Conley 188). The other type of suicide, altruistic suicide, reflects the opposite situation: when an individual is too socially integrated (Conley 189). This type of suicide occurs when members of a group or community become so totally engrossed by the group tha...
In 1897, Emile Durkheim (1997) showed that the suicide – perhaps the most personal of all decisions – could be analysed through the conceptual lenses of sociology.
Durkheim was concerned with studying and observing the ways in which society functioned. His work began with the idea of the collective conscious, which are the general emotions and opinions that are shared by a society and which shape likeminded ideas as to how the society will operate (Desfor Edles and Appelrouth 2010:100-01). Durkheim thus suggested that the collective ideas shared by a community are what keeps injustices from continuing or what allows them to remain.
When Durkheim conducted his research on suicide he did it with the intention of establishing Sociology as a science and as a result almost validate the worth and power of sociology. Before Durkheim’s study, suicide was considered only as the act of an individual however Durkheim’s theory was that suicide tied in with social structures and even though he believed that suicide is ‘the most personal act anyone can undertake’ (Durkheim, 1897), he also believed it was accredited to social causes.
Much like the later structural functionalists that he would inspire, such as Radcliffe-Brown, Durkheim’s grounding in science led to a methodological strength. By focusing on understanding a single aspect of society, such as division of labor or suicide rates, Durkheim could focus on empirical data to create a testable hypothesis based on statistics. This makes it easy to refute and/or refine statements he made, but also made them easier to compare cross-culturally to see if variation exists.
He gathered all this information which lead to a series of patterns. People were more likely to commit suicide if they were male, older, single, unemployed and Protestant. “It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political and moral beliefs that control our actions” (Durkheim, 1897). This quote comes from Durkheim’s
Durkheim, E. (1951). Suicide: A Study in Sociology. (J. A. Spaulding, & G. Simpson, Trans.)
In What is a Social Fact? (1895) Durkheim explains how people are constrained or restricted by ‘Social Facts’. He believes people fall into patterns in the way they think, act, feel, believe, value, etc, and all those things are influenced and exist outside of the individual. Durkheim goes on to explains that he carries out his commitments and fulfills his obligations or “duties as a brother, a husband, or a citizen” not because they have become his own sentiments, although they can become his own sentiments, but because they have been taught to him, even if one “wishes it or not”. It’s basically things that constrain an individual and make them feel pressured to act in predictable and established ways. Characteristics of social facts allow sociologist to study and identify them easily.
Although sociologists like J.D. Douglas would question the reliability of the statistics, due to the coroners decision being final, most sociologists would agree that Durkheim's study into suicide was successful, and indeed many have tried to develop and improve on his theory. Overall, this essay has shown that one type of methodology may not always be suitable for the particular research carried out. Both Interpretative sociology and the Positivist approach equally show that they are valid methods for carrying out research, but like everything, nothing is one hundred percent accurate. Therefore, there is always room for flaw, but in the study of Sociology, there is always room for more ways of obtaining and interpreting data.
Durkheim was a functionalist, and theorised that a holistic social narrative could be identified which would explain individual behaviour. He argued that, whilst society was made up of its members, it was greater than the sum of its parts, and was an external pressure that determined the behaviour of the individuals within it. At that time, suicide rates in Europe were rising, and so the causes of suicide were on the agenda. Since suicide is seen as an intrinsically personal and individual action, establishing it as having societal causes would be a strong defence for Durkheim’s functionalist perspective. Durkheim used the comparative method to study the official suicide rates of various European countries. While he was not the first to notice the patterns and proportional changes of suicide rates between different groups in European societies, it was this fact that was the foundation of his theory – why did some groups consistently have much higher rates than others? This supports the idea that it was the external pressures placed on certain groups within society that induced higher rates of suicide, and is the basis of Durkheim’s work.
Dokoupil, Tony. A. The "Suicide Epidemic" Newsweek Global 161.19 (2013): 1 Business Source Premier. EBSCO. Web.
Emile Durkheim was one of the earliest social theorists in France during the late 1800’s. Emile Durkin is both important and interesting for the field of sociology because of his attentiveness to moral and religious phenomena. In fact Edward A. Tiryakian (1964) suggested that Durkheim is in to be held to the same esteem as Max Weber and Sigmund Freud. “Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Emile Durkheim – certainly three towering figures of modern social thought – seem to have been concerned with three fundamental objects of inquiry which when examined closely enough turn out to be, interestingly to note, facets of the same phenomenon”.