SLGY 2232 Lecture 9: Chapter 9 – Unobtrusive Research
2 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Unobtrusive research methods of studying social behavior without affecting it. Unobtrusive measures can either be qualitative or quantitative: analysis of existing statistics, content analysis, historical and comparative research, qualitative. He used data from several european countries. Explored the possibility of factors such as weather, gender, age, and numerous others. Defined anomie, as normalessness or a general sense of social instability and disintegration. Key thesis; suicide rates vary with breaches in social equilibrium social stability and integration seem to offer protection against suicide and depression. He added the concept of anomie to the lexicon of social sciences. From several propositions, durkheim created the concept of anomic suicide. Durkheim"s unit of analysis was not the individual, it was the political-geographical unit: countries, regions, states, and cities. Durkheim avoided the danger of ecological fallacy (attributing to a person a characteristic that is the characteristic of a group) in two ways.
