Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
relevance of durkheim's theory of suicide
suicide in sociological perspective
suicide in sociological perspective
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: relevance of durkheim's theory of suicide
David Emil Durkheim is a renowned sociologist and also France’s first professor of sociology. Born on 15th, April in France, he successfully advocated for sociology to be recognized as an academic discipline. He did his first recognizable work titled ‘The division of labor in society’ in 1893 and then started the first European department sociology in a university in his homeland of France.
David Durkheim's main concern was to try and understand how communities could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era where common religions and ethnic backgrounds were stumbling blocks. He went ahead and developed many other sociology theories and arguments until his death in 1917. Some of his famous published work includes social stratification, sociology of knowledge, deviance and religion. But one of the most outstanding and fascinating of his work is suicide which was published in 1897 (Calhoun, 2002).
How Durkheim was able to show the social causes of suicide.
Durkheim compares the suicide rates among different categories of people both in individual levels and in the community at large. He treats suicide as a social fact explaining its occurrence by the use of social facts like; lack of group attachment and lack of behavior regulation. In personal perspective he argued that suicide is a personal act that involves personal psychology and purely individual thoughts. His explanations on suicide were partly hindered by unavailability of very precise or complete statistical data. He went ahead and described suicide as caused by factors like climate, race, mental illness, hereditary and imitation (Sociology 250, 1999).
Durkheim was able to show the social cause of suicide by observing and studying on varying socia...
... middle of paper ...
...ciologytwynham/suicide-presentation-927179
Durkheim Emile. Emile Durkheim on suicide. Retrieved from:
http://www2.uvawise.edu/pww8y/Soc/-Theorists/Durkheim/Suicide.html
Eskenazi Karin, (2009). Largest ever study of suicide in the military. Retrieved from:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/157916.php
Evans, (2011). Suicide causes and motivations. Retrieved from:
http://www.crimescenecleanup.com/Suicide_Causes_and_Motivations.html
Hassan Riaz, (1996). Social factors in suicide in Australia. Retrieved from:
http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/4/9/0/%7B490EDFD9-212E-414F-B4E5-F3DA8A6D0413%7Dti52.pdf
Kushner Howard I & Sterk Claire E, (2005). The limit of social capital. Retrieved from:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449331/
Sociology 250, (1999). Social facts and suicide. Retrieved from:
http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/o26f99.htm
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.
In Durkheim’s concept of social/moral regulation, society imposes limits on humans to regulate their passions, desires, expectations, ambitions and roles. When these limits or social regulations break down, the controlling authority the society once had no longer functions and people are left on their own to make their own plans. In societies that have low levels of social regulations, a state of Anomie, or normlessness, can occur and affect the whole society or just some of its groups. Anomic suicide was more prevalent in this type of society. Anomic suicide basically involve...
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.
Kuhl wrote about how Emile Durkheims idea’s about suicide is connected with social intergation. The authors argue that individual factors may play in for youth sucide as well as the social intergation.
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...
Emile Durkheim is largely credited as the man who made Sociology a science. As a boy, he was enraptured by the scientific approach to society, but at that time, there was no social science curriculum. Vowing to change this, Durkheim worked scrupulously to earn his “degree in philosophy in 1882”. (Johnson 34) Unable to change the French school system right away, Emile traveled to Germany to further his education. It was there that he published his initial findings and gained the knowledge necessary to influence the French education system. Emile Durkheim is a distinguished and well versed man who, through his work, established a platform for other sociologist to build on.
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.
The problem of suicide ravages the minds of its survivors – of philosophers – and, more recently, of psychologists. We simply cannot understand it. Why suicide? While many non-biological scientists are inclined to define suicide as a conscious act – thereby excluding, perhaps, all non-human self-inflicted deaths (1), (2) – lets us stick with the more basic definition of suicide as self-murder, with or without cognitive "knowledge" or "intent" (***). And, as the concerned psychologists plunge on in their direction, let us examine this problem from a different standpoint, that of biology. In order to make sense of the biology of suicide, however, we must first understand the more general omnipresent phenomenon: death....
In a study released by Brown University, their psychology department shed some light on common myths and facts surrounded suicide. These m...
Desfor Edles, Laura and Scott Appelrouth. 2010. “Émile Durkheim (1858-1917).” Pp. 100 and 122-134 in Sociological Theory in the Classical Era. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
There are two main threads of suicide. The social or institutional suicide and individual or
Comparing Weber's and Durkheim's Methodological Contributions to Sociology This essay will be examining the methodological contributions both Durkheim and Weber have provided to sociology. It will briefly observe what Positivists are and how their methodologies influence and affect their research. It will also consider what interpretative sociology is, and why their type of methodology is used when carrying out research. It will analyse both Durkheim's study of Suicide and also Webers study of The Protestant work ethic, and hopefully establish how each methodology was used for each particular piece of research, and why. Emile Durkhiem, in sociology terminology is considered to be a Functionalist, in addition to also being a Positivist, however, strictly speaking, Durkheim was not a Positivist.
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.
Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber are all important characters to be studied in the field of Sociology. Each one of these Sociological theorists, help in the separation of Sociology into its own field of study. The works of these three theorists is very complex and can be considered hard to understand but their intentions were not. They have their similarities along with just as many of their differences.
Talcott Parsons have some of the same views of sociology as Durkheim, he believed that social life is categorized by social cooperation. Parsons also believed that commitment to common values maintains or...