Study of Suicide

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses Emile Durkheim's belief that an individual tends to decide and act, not according to social restraint, but for the satisfaction of his or her own needs, with little thought or regard for the consequences on others. The paper examines Durkheim's study of suicide and explains the three types of suicide that he identified: egoistic, anomic and altruistic.

From the Paper:

"Emile Durkheim was primarily interested in how societies could remain coherent and integrated in present times when shared religious and ethnic background can no longer be relied on (Wikipedia 2005). Along with Herbert Spencer, he set the first scientific approaches to social phenomena that focused on social facts, instead of individual motivation. Durkheim suggested that social phenomena existed apart, independently and more objectively of individual actions and that these phenomena could be explained by other social facts other than society's, for example, climatic or ecological adaptation. This belief later came to be known as functionalism (Wikipedi)."

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