SOCA01H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: The Sociological Imagination, Auguste Comte, C. Wright Mills
Document Summary
Analyzing suicide sociologically tests the claim that sociology takes a unique, surprising, and enlightening perspective on social events. Usually interested in the events that caused individuals to become depressed or angry enough to kill themselves. At the end of the 19th century, durkheim demonstrated that suicide is more that just an individual act of desperation that result from a psychological disorder. He showed that social forces strongly influence suicide rates. Durkheim made his case by examining the association between rates of suicide and rates of psychological disorder for different groups. The idea that psychological disorder causes suicide is supported only if suicide rates tend to be high where rates of psychological disorder are high, and low where rates of psychological disorder are low. His analysis sources revealed nothing of the kind: discovered that there were slightly more women than men in insane asylums, but there were four male suicides for every female suicide.
