emile durkheim- le suicide

Emile Durkheim was considered one of the greats of the sociology world. His use of scientific methodology to identify social factors which contributed to suicide has produced a foundational model for empirically based social research still relevant in sociology today. The purpose of this essay is to examine Durkheim’s study of the social causes of suicide, specifically how his theory of social integration and regulation contributed in interpreting these differences in suicide rates. This essay will argue that although heavily criticised Durkheim’s findings of the social factors which contributed to suicide are still relevant in Australia today more than a century later. In order to support this claim, firstly an overview of Durkheim’s social theory will be provided, specifically of his social causes of suicide. In addition it will then focus on how Durkheim interpreted these differences in suicide rates between various groups using his theory of social integration and discuss the two types of suicide Durkheim identified in this area. We will then discuss social regulation and its two forms of suicide. Criticism of his theory will then be discussed, before providing relevant statistics from Australia in regards to suicide rates of teen and indigenous communities and examine these figures to explain these variances in light of Durkheim’s social theory’s, to support the fact that Durkheim’s theory’s are still relevant in Australia today.
Emile Durkheim was born in 1858 in a small town in Alsace-Lorraine, becoming a professor of sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris and passed in 1917. Durkheim came from an early positivist school of thought which insisted that sociology should be looked at as a scientific discipline which could be modelled off the natural sciences. This approach led to Durkheim using scientific methods of research, statistics and empirical data to help determine circumstances which contributed to human behaviour, for which the psychology discipline

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