Urbanism and Suicide: A Study of American Counties

Abstract

his study employs data from 3,108 counties in the United States to examine the effects of urbanism and a number of other variables on suicide. Grouping the counties into three categories (most urban, middle urban, rural) reveals a surpris- ing difference in the relative capacity of sociological variables to explain the inci- dence of suicide within each context. Sociological variables in the most urban counties tend to have a much stronger explanatory power than in the rural or middle urban counties. These results suggest that most sociological explanations for suicide apply primarily to urban environments and not rural ones. As Fischer (1982) has shown, types of relations which prevail in urban communities may be better conduits for social structural influences than those in rural environments. Structural explanations for suicide, therefore, may be best suited for urban envi- ronments and may be largely limited to them. Disagreement continues among social scientists about the effects of ur- banism and the extent and nature of differences between rural and urban life in American society. According to Wirth's (1938) influential classic formulation, the concentration of diverse people in large dense settle- ments produces social isolation and disorganization, excessive individual- ism, and other largely negative consequences. Other social scientists have supported an opposing thesis: that few, if any, sociocultural or social psy- chological characteristics are necessarily linked with the size, density, or heterogeneity of settlements (Dewey 1960; Gans 1962). Accordingly, pro- ponents of the latter view regard urban life as quite diverse, but with few