Proving Suicide

In the previous chapter it was argued that the questions students have raised about the viability of official suicide statistics for research purposes could only be answered by more systematic study. Official statistics are products of the system of theoretical categories in terms of which they are compiled and the bureaucratic and organisational procedures by which they are collected. Their evaluation for research, therefore, involves consideration of two interrelated sets of questions. First, analysis of the adequacy of the theoretical and conceptual categories of production and second, examination of the extent to which the data produced by the officials reflects these conceptual categories. I shall consider the first of these questions later in the work, where I shall try to show how many acts of self destruction that result in death fit comfortably into neither the category of ‘suicide’ nor ‘accident’. In this part of the work I shall be more concerned with the latter problem and its implications for research based on official suicide rates. In this context I shall use the term ‘bias’ to refer to systematic deviations from the theoretical suicide rate.

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