Sociological Autopsy Research Articles

Sociological Autopsy of the Suicide of the 159th Victim Following the Itaewon Disaster: Focusing on the Revictimization of Disaster Victims

Sociological Autopsy of the Suicide of the 159th Victim Following the Itaewon Disaster: Focusing on the Revictimization of Disaster Victims

A sociological autopsy lens on older adult suicide in rural Australia: Addressing health, psychosocial factors and care practices at the intersection of policies and institutions

This paper examines the interrelationship between suicide, health, socioeconomic, and psychosocial factors in contributing to suicide in older adults in rural Australia. Drawing on a coronial dataset of suicide cases and a mixed methods sociological autopsy approach, our study integrated a quantitative analysis of 792 suicide cases with a qualitative analysis of medico-legal reports from 30 cases. The sociological autopsy provided novel insights into the entanglement of policy and service provision at the state-level with individual end-of-life decisions. Particular attention is drawn to age and gendered dimensions of suicide, especially in relation to health and social issues. The study showed a continuity between suicide and the patterning of an individual's life course, including experiences and consequences of inequality and marginality; a desire to meet culturally–normative ideals of autonomy; and a fragmented, under-funded, and intimidating social care system that offered limited options.

International Relations at the End: A Sociological Autopsy

International Relations at the End: A Sociological Autopsy

Understanding the role of bereavement in the pathway to suicide

IntroductionBereavement is considered to be a common precursor of death by suicide. Studies suggest those bereaved by suicide may be particularly vulnerable to suicide themselves. Recently, there has been a concern over the number of deaths by suicide across UK and Europe. As a result, an increasing number have been exposed to bereavement by suicide. It remains unclear how these deaths might impact on future suicide rates.ObjectivesTo examine a two-year cohort of all suicides in Northern Ireland, in order to report on bereavements recorded in the records of those who died by suicide. To assess the bearing of these deaths on those left behind.AimsTo provide an estimate of the prevalence and types of bereavements that may have contributed towards the suicide.MethodsFollowing the sociological autopsy approach to studying death by suicide, data was collected from a range of sources, including GP records and Coroner records and interviews with bereaved relatives. The analyses draw on relatives’ accounts in order to increase our understanding of the impact of suicide bereavement. Interviews took place between 18 months and 5 years after the death by suicide.ResultsOf the 403 deaths by suicide, 15% of the individuals experienced bereavement and 9% bereavement by suicide. The results support the assertion in the literature that bereavement by suicide increases the risk of suicide through a process of suicide contagion.ConclusionsThe conclusion explains how the findings will be fed into knowledge translation processes, to provide future programs of suicide prevention research and changes to practice.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

What’s a life worth? Ethnographic counterfactual analysis, undocumented status and sociological autopsy in a wrongful death lawsuit

This paper asks ‘What is a life worth?’ by analyzing the wrongful death lawsuit for Douglas Morales, an undocumented student who died in 2008 at 17 from brain injuries suffered playing football. The paper first examines how sociologists and New Jersey law monetarily value a child’s life, especially when undocumented status would have decreased long-term earnings. Second, it uses ethnographic, counterfactual methods to do a ‘sociological autopsy’ offering a plausible alternative, a more positive scenario – including a path to legal status – for Douglas’s future life. It uses interviews and document review to establish Douglas’s life habits, leveraging sociological and psychological research on immigrant youth achievers to predict higher future earnings. The paper advances ‘public sociology’ by deploying ethnographic, case-oriented methods to challenge the devaluation of this undocumented life, critique American immigration policies, and to help the decedent’s family directly.

An exploration of integrated data on the social dynamics of suicide among women.

The gender-based nature of suicide-related behaviour is largely accepted. However, studies that report exclusively on female suicides are rare. Here we demonstrate how female suicide has effectively been 'othered' and appears incidental in studies which compare female and male behaviour. We highlight how recent studies of suicide have tended to be dominated by male-only approaches, which increasingly link issues of masculinity with male death by suicide.Drawing on data collected from the general practitioner and coroner's office, we then apply the sociological autopsy approach to a cohort of 78 deaths recorded as suicides in the UK between 2007 and 2009. By focusing on females in isolation from males, we demonstrate that, as in male-only suicide studies, it is similarly possible to draw out issues associated with the feminine identity, which can be linked to death by suicide. We find that bereavement, sexual violence and motherhood could all be linked to the lives and help-seeking of the females who died. In closing, we suggest that a reorientation towards sociological analytic approaches of female suicide may help to produce further reductions in the rate of female death by suicide. A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0w9KKMFdIQ.

La prevenzione del suicidio: contributi ad un approccio multidisciplinare

Current strategies in suicide prevention are strongly associated with biomedical, psychiatric and psychological studies, in which suicide is regularly represented as being an individual phenomenon. Some contributions certainly exist which pay attention to psyco-social aspects, as exemplified by research based on the notion of connectedness - particularly those concerning suicide in adolescents. However, in these cases both cultural and social conditions and micro-processes responsible for psychological pain receive insufficient consideration. Certain, recent sociological studies overcome such limitations. Among them, the sociological autopsy provides important insights beyond certain deficiencies of the psychological autopsy and is able to contribute to a real multidisciplinary suicidology

Ben FINCHAM, Susanne LANGER, Jonathan SCOURFIELD, Michael SHINER, 2011, Understanding Suicide : A Sociological Autopsy, New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 216 p.

With Understanding Suicide : A Sociological Autopsy, Ben Fincham, Susanne Langer, Johathan Scourfield, and Michael Shiner make an impressive contribution to the analysis of suicide thanks to groundbreaking research resorting to a method called “sociological autopsy”. The empirical part of the book is preceded by a critical overview of the major classical works in the study of suicide (Chapter 2) – Emile Durkheim, Ruth S. Caravan, Jack D. Douglas, and J. Maxwell Atkinson. All things considered...

Investigating Official Records of Suicides for Research Purposes

In many countries worldwide the circumstances of unnatural deaths, including suicides, are subject to official investigations, usually by medical examiners or coroners. In England and Wales, where our experience is based, investigations into sudden or unexplained deaths are conducted by a coroner, an independent officer appointed by the local government authority, who usually has a legal or medical professional background. Findings from the investigation are presented at a public inquest at which the coroner reaches a verdict about the likely cause of death. The paper records of the investigation (the “inquest record”) are usually then filed at the coroner’s offices or local authority archive. The content of inquest records varies, but they generally include police reports, witness statements, postmortem autopsy and toxicological reports, and, where judged appropriate, information on health service contact from general practitioners and psychiatrists. There may also be photographs of the scene of death and copies (or originals) of suicide notes. The files from these investigations are a valuable source of information to further our understanding of suicide, whether from a historical or sociological perspective (e.g., Atkinson, 1978; Bailey, 1998) or, in a public health context, by providing data relevant to suicide prevention strategies (Bennewith, Hawton et al., 2005). Suicide case files have been used for sociological autopsy studies (Langer, Scourfield, & Fincham, 2008), qualitative thematic analysis (Valle, Gosney, & Sinclair, 2008), and as part of psychological autopsy studies (Hawton et al., 1998). In addition, the health authorities in England and Wales are required to carry out local suicide audits, including an analysis of inquest records, though the value of this has been questioned (Caley & Fowler, 2008). Outside the United Kingdom, researchers have used inquest records to investigate various aspects of suicide, including social and environmental factors (Almasi et al., 2009), gender differences (Walsh, Clayton, Liu, & Hodges, 2009), and associations with specific problems (Wong, Cheung, Conner, Conwell, & Yip, 2010). In the United States, researchers use the reports compiled by the police, medical examiners, and coroners to extract data for the National Violent Death Reporting System (Ward, Shields, & Cramer, 2011). Yet working with such material can be challenging, both practically and emotionally, and there is relatively little published guidance on the use and limitations of these records (Bennewith, Hawton et al., 2005). To our knowledge, only one study has addressed the impact of such work on the researchers themselves (Fincham, Scourfield, & Langer, 2008). We have been involved in extracting information from coroners’ records for a number of research projects (e.g., Appleby, Cooper, & Amos, 1999; Bennewith, Gunnell et al., 2005; Hawton et al., 2005). This editorial draws on our experiences to highlight some of the issues that need to be considered when planning research into suicide based on records such as those produced by coroners in England and Wales.

Understanding suicide: a sociological autopsy

Suicide has an important place in the history of sociology, because of Durkheim's famous study and the debates that have followed since it was published more than a century ago. The sociological study of suicide remains a powerful illustration of competing paradigms. The bold aim of this book is to make a new contribution to this classic sociological debate. The authors highlight the importance of qualitatively-driven, mixed methods sociological research on individual suicides, coining the term 'sociological autopsy' to describe their ESRC-funded study of 100 suicide case files. They illustrate how qualitative and quantitative data can be combined; and navigate the dual paradigms of objectivism and constructionism, examining what can be known about suicidal lives and also taking a critical stance on the knowledge itself. Substantive themes developed in the book include the gendered character of suicidal behaviour, the role of the life-course and the importance of social bonds, especially intimate relationships.

‘Between the devil and deep …’ : a response to Cockerham and Coburn

My review article on health inequalities benefitted early on from the helpful, detailed and occasionally critical comments of two of the anonymous referees approached by the editors of Sociology of Health and Illness; a third referee exercised his or her right to call forth a plague on all my doings. In other words this is a contentious field, and my inevitably selective representation and forthright ‘take’ on it was always likely to irritate as many or more than it appealed to. Better this, I thought, than yet another account nestling in that hinterland of social epidemiology in which many a sociologist now seems to dwell. It is immensely encouraging that Bill Cockerham and David Coburn (a) accepted the editors’ invitation to comment, and (b) are broadly sympathetic with the principal criterion I invoke for a genuinely sociological approach to health inequalities, namely, one rooted in social structures. This is not of course to imply that they are entirely at one with the case I make. I will respond here to the main points they raise, after which I will be a touch harsher on myself than I perceive them to be: it is perhaps a truism that authors are more aware of lacunae or weaknesses in their arguments than are those who comment on them with a mix of rigour and collegial compassion.

The Missing Piece: A Sociological Autopsy of Firearm Suicide in the United States

Social, economic, violence, political, and gun access predictors of suicide and gun suicide were examined via sociological autopsy. The model predicting suicide rates overall had the best results, χ(2) (9, N=50)=5.279 (CMIN, the goodness of fit statistic that represents the minimum discrepancy between the unrestricted sample covariance matrix and the restricted covariance matrix) p=.809, [the goodness of fit statistic that represents the minimum discrepancy between the unrestricted sample covariance matrix and the restricted covariance matrix] indicating an excellent fit of the data and theoretical model. The model explained 76% of the variance in state suicide rates and was a significantly better predictor than one could expect by chance, F(6,43)=22.889, p<.001). All path coefficients were significant predictors of suicide with the exception of violence climate, which was not included. This study contributes to the theoretical knowledge by adding a comprehensive framework of analysis and model useful for prevention.

Sociological autopsy: An integrated approach to the study of suicide in men

This paper’s main aim is to argue the methodological case for a particular approach to researching the sociology of suicide. By way of illustrating the use of this approach it also offers some brief examples of substantive findings about the gendered character of men’s suicides. The first half of the article explains and justifies the research approach. This is a qualitatively-driven mixed method and dual paradigm study of individual suicides. It is a sociological study which draws on the tradition of psychological autopsies of suicide; hence the term ‘sociological autopsy’. The second half of the article offers brief illustrative findings from a specific research project which employed the sociological autopsy approach. This was a study of 100 suicide case files from a coroner’s office in the UK. There is discussion of common sense assumptions about suicide in men; the construction of evidence in case files; a typology of gendered suicides where relationship breakdown seems to be the principal trigger; and the value of case-based analysis, with a single case discussed in some detail.

When things fall apart: Gender and suicide across the life-course

Young men are often considered to be at particular risk of suicide, but such claims are partial and potentially misleading. Drawing on official statistics and an innovative, qualitatively driven, mixed method sociological autopsy of individual suicides, the authors of this paper argue that the vulnerability of 'young' men to suicide is often exaggerated and that insufficient attention is paid to the diverse social circumstances of suicidal men and women across the life course. Detailed analysis of 100 case files selected from a single coroner's office in the UK reveals that patterns of suicide can be seen to map on to conventional features of a socially structured life course, with young people in crisis, mid-life gendered patterns of work and family and older people in decline. Particular attention is drawn to suicide among those in mid-life and to the role of the social bond, especially in the form of attachment. Relationship breakdown is considered in some detail because it is central to understanding the demography of suicide and the significance of social bonds.

The Impact of Working with Disturbing Secondary Data: Reading Suicide Files in a Coroner's Office

The article discusses the effects on the researcher of reading disturbing secondary data (defined here as evidence gathered by someone other than the researcher). The case study is a qualitative sociological autopsy of suicide, and the secondary data--written documents and photographs--are all from case files in a British coroner's office. Following ethnographic detail about the research setting and research process, there is discussion of the diverse secondary data sources in these files, particularly in relation to the impact on the researcher. Some general observations are made about emotion in the research process and potential strategies for responding to emotion. The authors locate their responses to reading about suicides within the broader context of the social processing of death and distress, and also consider whether emotional reactions to data have any analytical purchase.

Documenting the Quick and the Dead: A Study of Suicide Case Files in a Coroner's Office

In keeping with recent critiques of literature on the body and the life course, the argument of this paper is that social identities can, to a certain extent, be constructed post-mortem and in the absence of a living body. The authors make this case with reference to a sociological autopsy study of a hundred suicide case files in a coroner's office in a medium-sized British city. The research draws on ethnographic approaches to the study of documents. There is discussion of some of the diverse artefacts in the coroners’ files: medical reports, witness statements and suicide notes. The identity work revealed in these sources is as much about the living as the dead and is especially bound up in the process of avoiding blame.