There are two main approaches to studying suicide in sociology - positivist and interpretive. Positivists like Durkheim used statistics to study suicide rates and their relationship to social integration and regulation. However, his concepts have been criticized as immeasurable. Interpretivists like Douglas argue qualitative methods are needed to understand the meaning of different suicides. Taylor combined qualitative and quantitative methods in his study of London Underground suicides. While the most comprehensive, his work has also received criticism. In conclusion, no single approach is perfect, and the most useful may be those that combine different methods.

1. Assess the usefulness of different sociological approaches to the study of
suicide. (21 marks)
Approaches to the study of suicide in sociology are divided roughly into two
different types. There are positivist approaches suggested by sociologists such
as Durkheim and interpretive approaches such as those suggested by Atkinson
and Douglas. This essay intends to consider the usefulness of these two
opposite approaches to the study of this topic.
Durkheim was one of the earliest sociologists to study suicide he suggested that
suicide was not just an individual act that it was influenced by wider social issues.
As a positivist Durkheim took a scientific approach to studying suicide and used
official statistic to study the topic and considered these to be social facts.
Durkheim noted correlations between suicide rates, such as single people
committed suicide more often than married people and suicide consistently was
more common in protestant countries compared to catholic countries. Durkheim
believed that the suicide rate in a country was influenced by two factors social
integration, how well people felt like they belonged to their society and social
regulation, how much their society controlled them. Too much or too little
increased suicide rates in a country and these suicides could be classified into
four types. For example, too much integration increased altruistic suicides
because people were over committed to their society they would commit suicide
for it, for example suicide bombers. In contrast societies with little integration had
egoistic suicide as people did not feel like part of something; Durkheim
suggested that this is why suicide was more common in protestant countries as
they have few shared rituals compared to catholic ones so feel less integrated.
Fatalistic suicide occurs in countries where behaviour is too controlled, like a
prison this could today apply to counties like North Korea. In countries with too
little control you get anomic suicide, this could explain why suicides are more
common in times of recession.
Some sociologists have suggested that Durkheim’s approach is useful as he
used official statistics so his study is scientific and reliable. It is also useful as his
study helped try and get sociology established as a credible discipline and even
a science. However, Durkheim’s theory may not be that useful as it has received
lots of criticism. For example, some sociologists have suggested that Durkheim
never operationalised his concepts of social integration and regulation and
therefore they are immeasurable and essentially useless.
However, the biggest criticism of Durkheim come from the interactionists
perspective they think the positivist approach Durkheim took is an inappropriate
way to study suicide and suggest this sensitive topic could truly be understood
via using qualitative methods. Douglas criticised Durkheim’s work on its
methodological grounds, he suggested that suicide statistics lack validity are
therefore useless. For example, he says the deaths can be misclassified as

2. suicide and therefore the statics will be inaccurate. For example, Durkheim
suggested that suicide rates were low in Catholic countries due to high social
integration. Douglass criticised this he would say that as for Catholics suicide is
a mortal sin families would put pressure on coroners to reach an alternative
verdict and the suicide figures were low due to inaccuracies. Douglas suggests
official statics are useless for studying suicide, for a further reason, he suggests it
is more important to look at the meaning of suicide. For example, a suicide
bomber killing themselves for Jihad has a totally different meaning that
somebody killing themselves because they are terminally ill; Counting suicides
does not take this into account. Douglas suggested that suicides can have a
range of meanings such as repentance, guilt, escape, etc. he also suggested that
we need to study them with qualitative methods and use case studies. Positivist
sociologists suggest that Douglas approach to suicide is useless, this is because
it subjective, unscientific. Furthermore, they would criticise Douglas as his
approach is classifying suicides by there meaning really any different than
classifying then into Durkheim’s four different types. Finally, the biggest criticism
of Douglas as he never actually did any case studies making his approach
minimally useful.
Atkinson took a totally different approach to Durkheim and Douglas. As an
interpretivist, he suggested that suicide statistics are a social construction. He
said it was important to establish how the statistics were constructed. He did this
by conducting unstructured interviews with coroners and established that they
took a commonsense approach to classifying deaths as suicide, looking at things
such as a note, the mode of death and biographical details. One thing that is
useful about his work is that it does indicate to use why some deaths are more
likely to be classed as suicide. However, Atkinson has been criticised by
positivist sociologists for his approach as essentially meaningless. This is
because he is interpreting what coroners interpretations and this is unscientific
and subjective and pointless.
Perhaps the most useful approach to suicide was that of Taylor. He suggested
that sociology had become bogged down with the positivist vs interpretivist
debate on suicide. So took a fresh approach and used both qualitative and
quantitative methods to study apparent suicides on the London underground.
From this he established that suicides could be classified based around the idea
of an individual being certain or uncertain about something or being attached or
detached from others. From this he suggested that suicides could be classified
into four types such as thantation, submissive, sacrifice and appeal. Taylor
approach is useful as it combined both qualitative and quantitative methods
making his study both reliable and valid. However, Taylor has received a lot of
criticism over the fact he used a lot of secondary data and is unaware of the
inaccuracies it contained. It has also been shown that in reality you cannot simply
classify suicide into four types. Furthermore, when you put his theory under real
scrutiny he says little that is different from Durkhwim.

3. In conclusion, the most useful approach to studying suicide is probably Taylor’s
this is because he used a range of different methods so avoids a lot of the
criticism that comes from simply using a postoivist or an interpretivist approach
on its own. However, if you were cynical you could say his is the least useful as
it suffers from the weaknesses of both the positivist and intrepretist approaches.