Usefulness Of Quantitative Suicide

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Assess usefulness of quantitative and qualitative sources of data in studying suicide The term quantitative refers to data that is measured on a numerical scale. It is preferred by sociologists such as Durkheim as they like scientific data that is representative and reliable. Qualitative data explores the meanings and motives of different human behaviors. Qualitative data is preferred by interpretivists like Durkheim because they wanted to gain validity and verstehen. Suicide can be operationalised in different ways. Positivists view suicide as a social fact as it is affected by external conditions. If the religion of the country was catholic for example Italy then the suicide rate will be low because suicide is seen as a sin in catholic…show more content…
From his correlations, he claimed to identify causal relationships between two factors: integration; the extent to which your linked to people, and regulation; the extent of rules and regulations a society has. He argued that too much and too little of these factors would make people vulnerable to suicide. For example, if someone had too much regulation, then committing suicide may be their response to over powering rules being put upon them. However, in identifying these causal relationships, Durkheim ignored the fact that suicide rates are socially constructed, therefore he wasn’t working with the true picture when identifying his relationships. Also, he correlated his evidence, meaning that the correlations he established may not demonstrate cause and effect. For example, Catholic countries have low suicide rates, but this may not be because there is too little integration but because doctors are more likely to lie on the death certificate. Therefore criticising Durkheim again as the data he used was not…show more content…
However, Douglas suggested causes of suicide included cries for help, revenge etc. Although, despite these differences, both quantitative and qualitative methods are advantageous in their own ways. Therefore it may be best to take Taylor’s method of triangulation to get a complete understanding of suicide. This is because if both qualitative and quantitative methods are used, you can gain a better understanding of both societies vulnerability and individuals vulnerability to suicide as quantitative methods focus more on the society, as official statistics are meant to be a whole picture. Whereas qualitative methods focus more on individual causes of suicide. However, the big criticism will always remain that all methods are limited by studying behaviours that one cannot
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