Citation

Van Poppel F, Day LH. Am. Sociol. Rev. 1996; 61(3): 500.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1996, American Sociological Association)

DOI

10.2307/2096361

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The data adduced by Durkheim in support of the association between religion and suicide have seldom been subjected to scrutiny; when they have been so examined, the scrutiny has been based, of necessity, on data subject to the "ecological fallacy." Data for the Netherlands, roughly contemporaneous with Durkheim's, that have recently come to light allow us to test the statisticical support for Durkheim's theory about religion and suicide without the risk of commiting this "fallacy". We find that the Catholic-Protestant differential in suicide rates to be explicable entirely in terms of the practice of categorizing as "sudden deaths" or "deaths fro ill-defined or unspecified cause" a large proportion of deaths from Catholics would have been categorizes as suicides had they occurred anong Protestants. This finding raises doubts not only about Durkheim's theory but also about other causal theories concerning suicide that rely on a sociological rather than a psychological (or even idiosyncratic) explanation.

Keywords: Suicide misclassification

Language: en