Public Attitudes Toward Suicide Demographic and Ideological Correlates

Abstract

Despite long-standing research interest in the social correlates of suicide, public attitudes toward have received comparatively little attention. Using data from NORC's General Social Survey, this study examines popular support for a person's right to commit when s/he is tired of living or faced with an incurable disease, bankruptcy, or family dishonor. Survey responses to these four items conform to a unidimensional Guttman-type scale. Opposition to suicide, as measured by this scale, varies along a number of sociodemographic lines. Prolife beliefs and civil libertarianism are strongly related to a person's attitudes toward and explain at least part of every sociodemographic relationship examined. By contrast, life satisfaction, anomia, and social participation measures show no significant associations with attitudes. Suicide, as a social phenomenon, has gained increased notoriety in recent years with widely publicized accounts of the suicide crisis among America's teens and heightened concern over right-to-die issues in the United States as well as abroad. The seeming failure to reach consensus on proposed strategies of intervention reflects the highly variegated nature of the problem and the growing ambivalence about what has traditionally been portrayed as a socially DARWIN SAWYER iS Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. JEFFERY SOBAL is Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1985 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and the American Association for Public Opinion Research. The authors wish to thank the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research for making the data for this study available. The data for the Spring 1982 General Social Survey, National Data Program for the Social Sciences, were originally collected by James A. Davis and Tom W. Smith of the National Opinion Research Center. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 51:92-101 ? by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press / 0033-362X/87/0051-01/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:20:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Public Attitudes Toward Suicide 93 deviant act. Interest in the normative bases of suicidal behavior dates at least as far back as Durkheim (1951), yet except for a handful of widely scattered and narrowly focused studies (Ansel and McGee, 1971; Domino, Gibson, Polling, and Westlake, 1980; Domino, Cohen, and Gonzalez, 1981; Domino, Moore, Westlake, and Gibson, 1982; Ginsburg, 1971; Hood, 1973; Kalish, 1963; Kalish, Reynolds, and Farberow, 1974; Shneidman, 1971), little evidence has been produced to support this popular conception of public attitudes toward suicide. Even less evidence is available showing whether such attitudes vary within the population, and if so, why. While opinion polls continue to show substantial public disapproval (Gallup, 1978), survey studies were reporting significant support for the rights of victims as early as 1970 (Beswick, 1970).1 In a more recent survey (Domino et al., 1980), 12% of the respondents felt that society had no right to interfere with the wishes of victims. Approval levels as high as 48% have been found in cases of terminal illness (NORC, 1983), and while clearly a less compelling justification, fully 20% of the population approves of even when one is simply a burden on his or her family (Gallup, 1978).