SOC101Y1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: The Sociological Imagination, Auguste Comte, Symbolic Interactionism
Document Summary
Emile durkheim, pioneers of the discipline, demonstrated that suicide is more than just an individual act of desperation resulting from psychological disorder, as was commonly believed. Suicide rates, he showed, are strongly influenced by social forces. Social solidarity - according to durkheim, the more a group"s members share beliefs and values, the more frequently and intensely they interact, the more social solidarity a group exhibits. In turn, the more social social solidarity the group exhibits, the more firmly anchored individuals are to the social world and the less likely they are to take their own lives if adversity strikes. Durkheim expected groups with a high degree of solidarity to have a lower suicide than groups with a low degree of solidarity. Durkheim showed that married adults are half as likely as unmarried adults articulate suicide. This is because marriage usually creates social ties and sort of moral cement that bind the individual to society.
