Suicide: A Study In Sociology

by Émile Durkheim

Book Overview

A classic book about the phenomenon of suicide and its social causes written by one of the world's most influential sociologists. Emile Durkheim's Suicide addresses the phenomenon of suicide and its... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684836327
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 1.2" x 5.4"

Customer Reviews

The best and first tutorial to the sociology

Durkheim says at the beginning; the sociology is the current science, but nobody knows what it is. Even now, his words sound contemporary. This study aims at introducing the necessity and importance of the sociology to the public, but not at sophisticatedly professional people.It matches the orientation of the primary students to study the sociology, because the preliminary knowledge isnft necessary. Actually, I could read this book at the first year of the university without any sociological knowledge. After finishing to read the first part, which proves that the suicide isnft the psychological phenomenon, but the sociological, you can investigate the present situation as he did in the 19th century by using the statistics of the international organization like WHO. You will find the manipulation of the statistics not only easy, but also important with Durkheimfs tutorial. It may be your first experience of the scientific study at the society.I can recommend it to the youth.

PIONEERING WORK IN SOCIOLOGY

This is the work considered the pioneer of modern sociology, with its author hailed the father of sociology. The innovative nature of the work lies in putting together all the methods of social analysis available at his time and providing a comprehensive view of the nature of suicide in society.Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, Durkheim provides the basis for the future development of sociology. He brings science to the study of society, by developing a hypothesis, gathering data and testing the hypothesis. He proves the powerful influence of society on the behavior of individuals, which, though obvious today, was not a clear conclusion at the time. This is a basic reading for anyone interested in sociology. However, anyone interested in the application of scientific methods to society and other non-traditional fields for science would also find it very useful.

Synthesis of intimately personal and powerfully public

Emile Durkheim's classic work tells us more than just details about suicide. Studying a powerfully individual phenomenon from a sociological perspective was, in its own right, an impressive undertaking. But what interests me more for sociology of media is the way Durkheim handled statistics. In the first chapter, he gives a series of examples that illustrate the danger in placing too much unexamined value in numerical data. He shows first that married people commit suicide more than singles, but then notes that single people include children who are unlikely to commit suicide. Therefore this data does not necessarily indicate a causal relationship between marriage and suicide. He adjusts the data, taking only people of marriage age and computes the data again. This time, single people commit suicide more than married people. However, Durkheim then notes that single people will automatically include a larger portion of mentally or physically defunct people. He therefore concludes that there is not sufficient data to make a conclusion about a causal relationship between suicide and marital status. This is really little more than mental exercise, but it is a critical one for any one employing survey methods and statistical analysis. The researcher must be vigilant in analyzing data to ensure avoiding errors in logic. Durkheim's study in sociology contributes much more than this detail to the social sciences, but for my purposes of analyzing the sociology of media, this is the most critical point.

Fascinating & Intelligent...From a man, who loved his subject

Emile Durkheim is called a Father of Sociology, and rightly so. He was the first man to work on all of the problems and issues, unresolved by other known sciences at the time ( in 19-century), to combine many of the already known scientific methods in one, and to call it sociology. Surely, there were other theorists, his contemporaries, who were starting to wander in the same direction at the same time with Durkheim, but he was the one, who put his own and other people's theories to practice. That is what "Suicide" is all about: gathering data and putting it to test with the theory (suicide, being the subject of the study in this case, of course). The best part about Durkheim's work presented in "Suicide" is that it is still an incredibly potent and groundbreaking manuscript. One, who reads it today, can't help but notice that human nature and human problems have largely remained the same: they are universal and ageless and they still need to be studied by competent sociologists.

Classic Sociological Study

One of the first quantitative and yet, qualitative sociological studies in history. From Durkheim's dissertation arises many diverse concepts on suicide. A must read for anyone studying sociological theory! Durkheim's Division of Labor and work on relgion, as well as Weber's theory on the Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism are also must reads for the sociological mind.