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Abstract
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The sociological study of suicide rates is based in part upon the assumption that different societies have very different suicide rates and that these suicide rates remain stable over time. If these conditions are met, then societal suicide rates are amenable to study.
The particular societies chosen vary widely. Ideally, of course, societies consist of different nations or primitive societies. The success of this type of study led investigators to explore correlates of the suicide rates of smaller regions within a country. Studies have been conducted of states and counties in the USA, for example, and on wards or census tracts within one city.
Such studies may be seen as simply extending to smaller regions a methodology developed on nations. However, investigators often talk of different regions within a culture as having unique subcultures, thereby applying the theoretical notions that guided the cross-national studies to these smaller regions.
There may be some truth to the notion of subcultures, since regions within nations do differ considerably in social characteristics. Furthermore, the division of a country into regions may be no less artificial than the way in which some nations have been created in the course of history, so that even today, some nations seem torn apart by internal strife between the regions, while others feel kinship with neighboring regions in other countries.
Language: en |