Practice question · True or false
Durkheim explained the suicide rate by the psychological states of the individuals who died.
Hints
- Ask what a psychological explanation could say about a rate that stays constant while the people change.
- His unit of analysis is the population, not the person.
Show the answer
False
Why
False, and the inversion is the whole point of the book. He argued that the rate is a property of a group, explicable by that group’s degree of integration and regulation, and that psychology explains which member of a population is at risk rather than how many will die.
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…
- Match each response to the adaptation of Merton’s five that it represents.
- Complete the account of the two concepts of anomie.
- Douglas critiqued Durkheim's use of official suicide rates as objective social facts. What follows from…
- 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.