Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organization of Sudden Death

233 Pages·1978·17.335 MB·English

by  J. Maxwell Atkinson

DISCOVERING SUICIDE
Studies in the Social Organization of
Sudden Death
J.
Maxwell Atkinson
University of Pittsburgh Press
First published in Great Britain 1978 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Published in the U.S.A. 1978 by the
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS,
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15260
c J. Maxwell Atkinson 1978
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Atkinson, John Maxwell
Discovering suicide.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Suicide. 2. Suicide - Research. 3. Sudden death.
I. Title.
HV6545.A84 616.8'5844 77-11913
ISBN 0--8229-1130-2
Printed in Great Britain by
UNWIN BROTHERS LTD
Woking and London
'Being unable to find an example of suicide that cannot be explained by
Durkheim's theories, I cannot but be convinced of their validity.'
'Durkheim's analysis is extremely convincing. After reading his book,
one tends to think of various situations in which suicide could occur,
and always it will fit in with his theory.'
Extracts from essays by
first-year sociology students
Contents
Preface lX
Acknowledgements xiii
PART 1: SUICIDE AND SOCIOLOGY
Background and Introduction in the Research 3
2 The Suicide Problem in Sociology 9
3 Suicide Research and Data Derived from Official Sources 33
4 Alternative Sociological Approaches to Suicide Research 68
PART II: SUICIDE AND THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF
SUDDEN DEATH
5 Registering Sudden Deaths: Official Definitions and
Procedures 87
6 Some Relevant Factors in Imputing Suicide 110
7 Common-Sense Theorizing about Suicide 148
8 Ethnomethodology and the Problem of Categorization 175
Notes 198
Select Bibliography 212
Index 221
'Tables and Figures
Table 2.3.1 Summary statement of central assumptions and criti-
cisms of positivism 20
Table 4.2.1 Three stages in the processes leading to suicides being
recorded as such 69
Table 5.3.1. Official Certification procedures used by coroners in
England and Wales and the numbers processed in
1969 101
Table 5.3.2 Verdicts available to coroners, together with the numbers
returned in 1969 102
Table 7 .2.1 Sex, age and marital status of seventy accidents and
seventy suicides 152
Table 7 .2.2. Types of evidence present in cases resulting in verdicts of
suicide and accidental death 154
Table 7.2.3. 'Positive' and 'negative' evidence presented and verdicts
155
Figure 5.1.1. Schematic representation of different types of definitions
of suicide 88
Figure 5.3.1. Extract from pathologist's report form 97
Figure 5.3.2. Schematic representation of the death registration
process in England and Wales 99
Figure 6.6.1. A dynamic model of the transmission of shared
definitions of suicide through a social system 145
Preface
The research reported in this book was originally written up as a thesis
for a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Essex. Other research and
teaching committments meant that it always had to be done as part
time venture, which is one reason why it took about seven years to com
plete. Another is that the work was started in the late 1960s at a time
when the theoretical and methodological turmoils which have
characterized the last decade of sociology were beginning to have
widespread influence in Britain. The emergent debates posed new and
difficult challenges for empirically oriented researchers so that, having
begun with an almost total lack of awareness that there might be
serious problems with traditional positivist research procedures, I
developed during the present work a commitment first to symbolic in
teractionism and second to ethnomethodology. While such changes in
orientation clearly involve taking theoretical writings seriously, I
started with and retained a certain scepticism about the kind of
abstract sociological theorizing which abounds with criticisms and
suggestions about empirical research without showing any sign of being
based on attempts to resolve the problems at first hand. I like to think,
therefore, that the transition from positivism through interactionism to
ethnomethodology described in this book was influenced at least as
much by the attempts to explore theoretical ideas in empirical settings
as by reading about the competing theories themselves. To this extent,
then, it can be read as a chronicle of one empirical researcher's
attempts to come to terms with the theoretical developments which
were taking place in the discipline while the research was being done.
There is another sense in which the book may be seen as a reflection
of (or perhaps a reaction against) contemporary developments in
professional sociology. For it is arguable that the dominant British
response to the availability of competing paradigms has been to talk
about them rather than to try working within them. Such a trend was
probably inevitable given the way academic life in Britain is structured
and the rapid growth of sociology during the late 1960s. Compared
with, for example, the situation in American universities, there is much
less scope for British academics to get the amount of time away from
teaching that is needed to engage in extensive empirical work. This
X Discovering Suicide
may not matter too much as far as survey research is concerned, as the
time-consuming work of data collection and ·analysis can be con
veniently passed on to assistants and other agencies, but the kinds of
unstructured observational studies called for by some perspectives are
much less amenable to such delegation. In selecting examples of em
pirical studies to illustrate different ftipproaches for their students,
therefore, teachers have to rely heavily on the work of others, so that the
ever-present and sometimes only option as far as their own research
output is concerned is to tidy up lecture notes for publication as synthe
sizing texts. This temptation, furthermore, was added to greatly by the
demand for textbooks that was created by the massive expansion of
sociology in British higher education.
The point of these remarks is to prepare the way for a confession that
the present book was originally conceived of as two separate studies.
The first was to have been a literature review /personal essay on the
sociology of suicide, and the second an empirical thesis/monograph.
The beginnings of the former project have survived in Chapter 2 of the
present volume, which was intended to provide a version of what it is
about suicide that sociologists have found interesting. Having got that
far, however, I found I could no longer distinguish satisfactorily
between the two enterprises, as my views on the suicide literature were
so closely bound up with a very particular empirical problem which un
derpinned so much of the research on suicide by sociologists and
others, namely the status of the data used in testing hypotheses.
Indeed, it was not until I had redefined the project as a single and more
limited one that I was able to continue writing beyond Chapter 2 and,
while it was originally prepared with the literature review project in
mind, it has nevertheless been retained more or less intact. For one
thing, it provides some kind of a warrant for not giving too much atten
tion to the issues which sociological researchers into suicide are nor
mally expected to attend to {e.g. anomie; the dispute between
sociological and psychological modes of explanation; etc.). And more
generally my hope is that the discussion of 'The Suicide Problem in
Sociology' will give student and non-~ciological readers some clarifica
tion of the character of sociologists' interest in suicide.
My main regret about the book is that the journey through the
perspectives does not extend further than it does into the final one, so
that it may be open to the complaint that it is no more than yet another
programmatic statement on behalf of ethnomethodology. Against this,
however, I would note first that some of the analyses, which were done
even before the final transition, were carried out (albeit unwittingly) in
a style which is just about recognizable as ethnomethodology of the
pre-conversational analysis era. Second, I would like to think that it
both differs from and complements more abstract programmatic
writings by describing an empirical route to etlinomethodology which
has not previously been documented in detail. Thus, I have tried to
Preface xi
elaborate as clearly as I am able how the empirical research not only
was guided by interpretations of the competing perspectives, but also
prompted reassessments and new commitments. And a possible lesson
in all this may be that attempts to work naively within a particular
paradigm can be just as convincing and satisfying a way of discovering
strengths and weaknesses as purely theoretical exegesis. Finally, to the
extent that the research was heavily influenced by the interactionist
literatW'e on the sociology of deviance, the direction taken as a way
forward from labelling theory contrasts markedly with the dominant
post-interactionist tendencies, particularly in Britain, which have been
quick to dismiss ethnomethodology in favour of a variety of
macro-structural-radical alternatives. In this particular area, then,
there is arguably a special case even for abstracted programmatics
which give voice to a dissenting view, and this work will hopefully make
a small contribution towards redressing the balance away from the new
conventional wisdoms about deviance.
The slow pace of the work, coupled with the fact that it was done in
three universities, has meant that I have discussed various _parts of it
with more people than is perhaps usual in ventures of this sort. Those
who have encouraged me will mostly know who they are and if they are
not aware of my gratitude to them, I thank them now. Of those deser
ving special mention, Terence Morris did me a great service by spark
ing off the initial interest in official statistics in a seminar at the London
School of Economics. Alasdair Macintyre, my supervisor for the first
couple of years or so, then gave me the opportunity to pursue it by hir
ing me as his research assistant and, had he not taken my ill-formulated
ideas seriously, the research would almost certainly never have got off
the ground. For this and the ongoing stimulation which is a feature of
regular encounters with him I shall always be grateful. During the tran
sition to interactionism, Dorothy Smith was a constant source of help
and encouragement and, after her departure from Essex to North
America, similar sub-cultural support was provided by the regular con
tact with friends at meetings of the National Deviancy Conference, and
particularly with Phil Strong, Mike Hepworth and Margaret Voysey.
The transition to ethnomethodology was greatly eased by Rod Watson,
to whom my debts of gratitude cannot readily be documented. The final
stage of writing up the research coincided with Harold Garfinkel's stay
at Manchester as Simon Visiting Professor and, without his sym
pathetic encouragement, I might well have scrapped the whole project
on the grounds that the kind of work I was doing had been superseded
by the emergence of conversational analysis within ethnomethodology.
Of those who read and commented on the book when it was still a
thesis, I am particularly grateful to Colin Bell, Stan Cohen, Gordon
Horobin, Jeff Coulter and John Heritage for being encouraging about
publication, even though not all of them agreed with the general thrust
of the argument.
Xll Discovering Suicide
The empirical materials could not have been gathered without the
help and co-operation of coroners, policemen and others who must re
main anonymous. My gratitude to them and my high regard for their
competence as theorizers will hopefully be evident in what follows. One
who can be mentioned is Dr Charles Clark who, as Essex County
Coroner, played an important part in initiating suicide research at his
local university by offering to make his records available for researchers
there. I took advantage of his offer and also of his willingness to talk
more generally about his work, and for this I am very grateful.
I must also record my thanks to the University of Lancaster for gran
ting me a term's study leave which enabled me to get on with some of
the fieldwork and writing. Parts of my research were also made possible
by the award of Social Science Research Council Grant HR 1496/1
'Community Reactions to Deviance'. I am also grateful to Pennt Anson
and Margaret Whittall for surviving the task of typing so morbid a
manuscript. Without the constant support and encouragement of my
wife the project would certainly never have been completed and, in ad
dition to the things wives are normally commended for in prefaces, I am
particularly thankful to mine for not being a sociologist. Her lay
member's scepticism about the discipline has continually kept me on
my toes.
MAXWELL ATKINSON