Practice question · Multiple choice
Douglas critiqued Durkheim's use of official suicide rates as objective social facts. What follows from treating suicide verdicts as social constructions rather than neutral measurements?
Hints
- Who decides whether an ambiguous sudden death is recorded as a suicide?
- What does an institutional record measure besides the act itself?
Show the answer
D. Comparative rates reflect reporting processes over acts
Why
Douglas argued official statistics capture the social judgements and negotiations of coroners and families, not pure objective counts. Critiquing institutional categorisation shifts analysis toward the social construction of records without dismissing sociology entirely.
Practise Integration, Anomie and Deviance
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More questions on Integration, Anomie and Deviance
- Arrange these contributions to the sociology of deviance, earliest first.
- Durkheim argued that the suicide rate is a social fact. Which of his claims explain why he thought it could…
- Durkheim explained the suicide rate by the psychological states of the individuals who died.
- Match each response to the adaptation of Merton’s five that it represents.
- Complete the account of the two concepts of anomie.
- Arrange the steps of Lemert’s route from primary to secondary deviance.
- In which year did Durkheim publish Suicide, his demonstration that a rate can be a social fact?
- On Becker’s definition, whether an act is deviant depends on the reaction it provokes rather than on any…
- Estimate how many years separate Durkheim’s Suicide and Merton’s paper Social Structure and Anomie.