The quality of life and suicide rates in American cities in 1930.

Abstract

Lester (1986) argued [based on the theory of Henry and Short (1984)l that, where the quality of life is better, people have less justification for blaming others for their misfortunes and so are more likely to become depressed and suicidal. H e has shown that both nations and states with a higher quality of life have higher suicide rates. The present note examines the association of the suicide rates of 68 major American cities from 1925 to 1929 (Dublin & Bunzel, 1933) with the quality of life in those cities in 1930 as rated by Thorndike (1976) based on a variety of social indcators, such as infants' death rate and expenditure on schools. The mean q u d t y of life was 38.4 (SD = 7.2) and the mean suicide rate was 16.2 per 100,000 per year (SD = 5.5) . The Pearson r between these two variables was 0.30 (one-tailed, p < .01), confirming Lester's earlier results of analyses for nations and American states.