DISCOVERING SUICIDE

DISCOVERING SUICIDE
Studies in the Social Organization of
Sudden Death

J. Maxwell Atkinson

~
MACMIllAN
© J. Maxwell Atkinson 1978

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To the memory of my father
Contents

Tables and Figures viii

Preface to the Paperback Edition ix

Preface xii

Acknowledgements xvi

PART I: SUICIDE AND SOCIOLOGY

1 Background and Introduction in the Research 3

3 Suicide Research and Data Derived from Official Sources 33

4 Alternative Sociological Approaches to Suicide Research 68

PART II : SUICIDE AND THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

OF SUDDEN DEATH

5 Registering Sudden Deaths: Official Definitions and

Procedures 87

6 Some Relevant Factors in Imputing Suicide 110

7 Common-Sense Theorizing about Suicide 148

8 Ethnomethodology and the Problem of Categorization 175

Notes 198

Select Bibliography 212

lnde~ 221
'Tables and Figures

Table 2.3.1 Summary statement of central assumptions and criti-

cisms of positivism 20
Table 4.2.1 Three stages in the processes leading to suicides being
recorded as such 69
Table 5.3.1. Official Certification procedures used by coroners in
England and Wales and the numbers processed in
1969 101
Table 5.3.2 Verdicts available to coroners, together with the numbers
returned in 1969 102
Table 7.2.1 Sex, age and marital status of seventy accidents and
seventy suicides 152
Table 7.2.2. Types of evidence present in cases resulting in verdicts of
suicide and accidental death 154
Table 7.2.3. 'Positive' and ' negative ' evidence presented and verdicts
155

Figure 5.1.1. Schematic representation of different types of definitions

of suicide 88
Figure 5.3.1. Extract from pathologist's report form 97
Figure 5.3.2. Schematic representation of the death registration
process in England and Wales 99
Figure 6.6.1. A dynamic model of the transmission of shared
definitions of suicide through a social system 145
Preface to the Paperback Edition

One reason for reprinting this book in paperback is that some of my

work on suicide is now used as a teaching aid in various courses where
students are exposed to Durkheim's classic treatise on the subject. In
some respects, of course, it is quite gratifying to find oneself being listed,
even as 'secondary reading', along with one of the more famous founding
fathers of sociology. But it is also somewhat unnerving to think that
relative newcomers to the discipline may be having to familiarise them-
selves with the products of one's first serious attempts to do research .
This is particularly so given my strong suspicion that the most commonly
cited reference may not be this book at all , but is more probably an
article which appeared several years before the present project was com -
pleted ('Societal Reactions to Suicide: The Role of Coroners' Definitions,
in S. Cohen (Ed .), 1971, pp. 165-91). That the trailer may be more
widely known than the main film might not matter were it not for the
fact that the ending was subsequently revised . I therefore have mis-
givings about the thought of being cited as representing a position to
which I no longer fully subscribe. and which I sought to modify and
clarify when writing the present book. If nothing else. then, I hope that
this paperback edition will make it easier for those who found some
interest in the earlier paper to compare it with the extended version
included here as Chapter 6 . and to note the criticisms of it which con -
tinue into Chapter 7.
A related reason for making the book more readily available is that it
has evidently also found favour in some quarters as a reasonably ac -
cessible statement of the problems and issues associated with the emer-
gence of ethnomethodology. Here again I have certain reservations.
particularly if it is seen as being representative of research in ethno-
methodology and conversation analysis as it is currently practised. And,
as I have noted in a more recently formulated view of works like the
present one, they are also open to other interpretations with which their
authors may disagree:

Ethnomethodological studies of official categorisation procedures are

sometimes regarded as being merely negative critiques of the way
sociologists have traditionally used officially derived data for research
purposes. They are also sometimes read as recommendations to the
 x Discovering Suicide

effect that previous methodological procedures should be reformed or

improved, so thar .in future 'more careful' or 'more accurate' studies
could be based on the analysis of official statistics. These are not,
however, the implications that ethnomethodologists take from their
work on official categorisations. Rather they see them as confirma-
tions of the promise of treating methods of reasoning, hitherto taken
for granted, as the topic for inquiry, and of the essentially unin-
teresting and un-newsworthy character of professional research that
merely relies on them as an unexplicated resource. Accordingly,
traditional approaches to the social and behavioural sciences are
viewed as interesting only in so far as they, like the analyses by
coroners and others, testify to the methodic ways in which human
beings are readily able to construct plausible descriptions of social
action and social order. Thus, if the production of ambitious and
plausible-sounding theories (whether of crime, suicide, or society as a
whole) is such an easily and routinely accomplishable task, then to
adopt the construction of such theories as a professional enterprise
hardly seems enough of a challenge to justify a specialised discipline
such as sociology. But what does emerge as being much more of a
challenge is the attempt to identify and explicate the workings of the
methodic ways in which members collaborate to produce sense,
facticity and orderliness (Atkinson, 1981, p . 216).

A range of empirical investigations have now been .conducted in

response to this challenge, and readers curious to learn more about the
directions taken in such work are recommended to refer to some of the
research reports that have become available since this book was first
'published (e.g, Schenkein, 1978; Sociology, 1978; Psathas, 1979;
Atkinson and Drew, 1979; Sociological Inquiry, 1980; Goodwin, 1981;
Atkinson and Heritage, 1983). Taken together, these and other studies
conducted within the framework established by Harold Garfinkel and
Harvey Sacks represent an expanding research literature on the organi-
sation of naturally occurring social interaction. It is being produced by
researchers who share a common commitment to the investigation of
previously unexplored levels of orderliness in human conduct , and to the
view that the viability of any approach to research, including their own,
should in the long run be judged in terms of its capacity to generate
original discoveries that can be made openly available for public scrutiny
and evaluation.
The fact that such work has developed and diversified in ways that
could not have been foreseen when the present book was written is in my
view an extremely promising sign . For if the directions it has taken could
have been accurately anticipated in advance of research being done ,
there might then have been grounds for doubting its claims to be ex-
ploring new and previously uncharted territory. But such developments
also mean that readers looking to this book for a short cut to the frontiers
 Preface to the Paperback Edition xi

are likely to be disappointed, and should certainly not expect to be taken

more than part of the way there.
I hope nonetheless that it may help to illustrate and clarify some of the
issues in response to which ethnomethodology first emerged. The con-
tinuing relevance of these for debates about alternative approaches to
sociology has not substantially diminished over the past several years,
and seems unlikely to do so until there is a more widespread willingness
to question the extraordinarily influential claim contained in the
opening paragraph of Durkheim's Suicide - namely that social science
can and should proceed without paying serious attention to the ways in
which phenomena like suicide are understood and analysed in everyday
conversation. Research in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
starts from exactly the opposite position, and the present study seeks to
elaborate on some of the reasons for so doing.

May 1982 MAXWELL ATKINSON

REFERENCES

ATKINSON , 1- M. (1981) 'Ethnomethodological Approaches to Socio-

Legal Studies'. In Podgorecki, A. , and Whelan, C. J. (Eds.). Socio-
logical Approaches to Law. London: Croom Helm: 201-23 .
ATKINSON, J. M., DREW, P. (1979) Order in Court : The Organisa-
tion of Verbal Interaction inJudicial Settings. London: Macmillan.
ATKINSON , J. M. and HERITAGE, J. (1983) Structures of Social
Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press .
GOODWIN, C. (1981) Conversational Organization: Interaction
between Speakers and Hearers . New York : Academic Press.
PSATHAS , G., (Ed .) (1979) Everyday Language: Studies in Ethno-
methodology. New York: Irvington.
SCHENKEIN, J., (Ed .) (1978) Studies in the Organization of Con -
versational Interaction . New York : Academic Press.
Sociological Inquiry . (1980) Special Issue on 'Language and Social
Interaction'. Volume 50, Numbers 3-4.
Sociology. (1978) Special Issue on 'Langu age and Practical Reasoning'.
Volume 12, Number 1.
Preface

The research reported in this book was originally written up as a thesis

for a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Essex. Other research and
teaching committments meant that it always had to be done as part-
time.venture, which is one reason why it took about seven years to com-
plete. Another is that the work was started in the late 1960s at a time
when the theoretical and methodological turmoils which have
characterized the last decade of sociology were beginning to have
widespread influence in Britain. The emergent debates posed new and
difficult challenges for empirically oriented researchers so that, having
begun with an almost total lack of awareness that there might be
serious problems with traditional positivist research procedures, I
developed during the present work a commitment first to symbolic in-
teractionism and second to ethnomethodology. While such changes in
orientation clearly involve taking theoretical writings seriously, I
started with and retained a certain scepticism about the kind of
abstract sociological theorizing which abounds with criticisms and
suggestions about empirical research without showing any sign of being
based on attempts to resolve the problems at first hand. I like to think,
therefore, that the transition from positivism through interactionism to
ethnomethodology described in this book was influenced at least as
much by the attempts to explore theoretical ideas in empirical settings
as by reading about the competing theories themselves. To this extent,
then, it can be read as a chronicle of one empirical researcher's
attempts to come to terms with the theoretical developments which
were taking place in the discipline while the research was being done.
There is another sense in which the book may be seen as a reflection
of (or perhaps a reaction against) contemporary developments in
professional sociology. For it is arguable that the dominant British
response to the availability of competing paradigms has been to talk
about them rather than to try working within them. Such a trend was
probably inevitable given the way academic life in Britain is structured
and the rapid growth of sociology during the late 1960s. Compared
with, for example, the situation in American universities, there is much
less scope for British academics to get the amount of time away from
teaching that is needed to engage in extensive empirical work . This
 Preface xiii

may not matter too much as far as survey research is concerned, as the
time-consuming work of data collection and analysis can be con-
veniently passed on to assistants and other agencies, but the kinds of
unstructured observational studies called for by some perspectives are
much less amenable to such delegation. In selecting examples of em-
pirical studies to illustrate different approaches for their students,
therefore, teachers have to rely heavily on the work of others, so that the
ever-present and sometimes only option as far as their own research
output is concerned is to tidy up lecture notes for publication as synthe-
sizing texts . This temptation, furthermore, was added to greatly by the
demand for textbooks that was created by the massive expansion of
sociology in British higher education.
The point of these remarks is to prepare the way for a confession that
the present book was originally conceived of as two separate studies.
The first was to have been a literature review/personal essay on the
sociology of suicide, and the second an empirical thesis/monograph.
The beginnings of the former project have survived in Chapter 2 of the
present volume, which was intended to provide a version of what it is
about suicide that sociologists have found interesting. Having got that
far, however, I found I could no longer distinguish satisfactorily
between the two enterprises, as my views on the suicide literature were
so closely bound up with a very particular empirical problem which un-
derpinned so much of the research on suicide by sociologists and
others, namely the status of the data used in testing hypotheses.
Indeed, it was not until I had redefined the project as a single and more
limited one that I was able to continue writing beyond Chapter 2 and,
while it was originally prepared with the literature review project in
mind, it has nevertheless been retained more or less intact. For one
thing, it provides some kind of a warrant for not giving too much atten-
tion to the issues which sociological researchers into suicide are nor-
mally expected to attend to (e.g , anomie; the dispute between
sociological and psychological modes of explanation; etc .). And more
generally my hope is that the discussion of 'The Suicide Problem in
Sociology' will give student and non-sociological readers some clarifica-
tion of the character of sociologists' interest in suicide.
My main regret about the book is that the journey through the
perspectives does not extend further than it does into the final one, so
that it may be open to the complaint that it is no more than yet another
programmatic statement on behalf of ethnomethodology. Against this ,
however , I would note first that some of the analyses, which were done
even before the final transition, were carried out (albeit unwittingly) in
a style which is just about recognizable as ethnomethodology of the
pre-conversational analysis era. Second, I would like to think that it
both differs from and complements more abstract programmatic
writings by describing an empirical route to ethnomethodology which
has not previously been documented in detail. Thus, I have tried to
XlV Preface

elaborate as clearly as I am able how the empirical research not only

was guided by interpretations of the competing perspectives, but also
prompted reassessments and new commitments. A9d a possible lesson
in all this may be that attempts to work nalvely within a particular
paradigm can be just as convincing and satisfying a way of discovering
strengths and weaknesses as purely theoretical exegesis. Finally, to the
extent that the research was heavily influenced by the interactionist
literature on the sociology of deviance, the direction taken as a way
forward from labelling theory contrasts markedly with the dominant
post-interactionist tendencies, particularly in Britain, which have been
quick to dismiss ethnomethodology in favour of a variety of
macro-structural-radical alternatives. In this particular area, then,
there is arguably a special case even for abstracted programmatics
which give voice to a dissenting view, and this work will hopefully make
a small contribution towards redressing the balance away from the new
conventional wisdoms about deviance.
The slow pace of the work, coupled with the fact that it was done in
three universities, has meant that I have discussed various parts of it
with more people than is perhaps usual in ventures of this sort . Those
who have encouraged me will mostly know who they are and ifthey are
not aware of my gratitude to them, I thank them now. Of those deser-
ving special mention, Terence Morris did me a great service by spark-
ing off the initial interest in official statistics in a seminar at the London
School of Economics. Alasdair MacIntyre, my supervisor for the first
couple of years or so, then gave me the opportunity to pursue it by hir-
ing me as his research assistant and, had he not taken my ill-formulated
ideas seriously, the research would almost certainly never have got ofT
the ground. For this and the ongoing stimulation which is a feature of
regular encounters with him I shall always be grateful. During the tran-
sition to interactionism, Dorothy Smith was a constant source of help
and encouragement and, after her departure from Essex to North
America, similar sub-cultural support was provided by the regular con-
tact with friends at meetings of the National Deviancy Conference, and
particularly with Phil Strong, Mike Hepworth and Margaret Voysey.
The transition to ethnomethodology was greatly eased by Rod Watson,
to whom my debts of gratitude cannot readily be documented.The final
stage of writing up the research coincided with Harold Garfinkel's stay
at Manchester as Simon Visiting Professor and, without his sym-
pathetic encouragement, I might well have scrapped the whole project
on the grounds that the kind of work I was doing had been superseded
by the emergence of conversational analysis within ethnomethodology.
Of those who read and commented on the book when it was still a
thesis , I am particularly grateful to Colin Bell, Stan Cohen, Gordon
Horobin, Jeff Coulter and John Heritage for being encouraging about
publication, even though not all of them agreed with the general thrust
of the argument.
 Preface xv

The empirical materials could not have been gathered without the
help and co-operation of coroners, policemen and others who must re-
main anonymous. My gratitude to them and my high regard for their
competence as theorizers will hopefully be evident in what follows. One
who can be mentioned is Dr Charles Clark who, as Essex County
Coroner, played an important part in initiating suicide research at his
local university by offering to make his records available for researchers
there. I took advantage of his offer and also of his willingness to talk
more generally about his work, and for this I am very grateful.
I must also record my thanks to the University of Lancaster for gran-
ting me a term's study leave which enabled me to get on with some of
the fieldwork and writing. Parts of my research were also made possible
by the award of Social Science Research Council Grant HR 1496/1
'Community Reactions to Deviance'. I am also grateful to Penny Anson
and Margaret Whittall for surviving the task of typing so morbid a
manuscript. Without the constant support and encouragement of my
wife the project would certainly never have been completed and, in ad-
dition to the things wives are normally commended for in prefaces, I am
particularly thankful to mine for not being a sociologist. Her lay
member's scepticism about the discipline has continually kept me on
my toes.

MAXWELL ATKINSON
Acknowledgements

Some of the material in Chapter 3 was originally published in 'Status

Integration, Suicide and Pseudo-Science', in Sociology, 7 (1973) pp . 251-
64. Some of that in Chapter 4 first appeared in 'On the Sociology of
Suicide', in Sociological Review, 16 (1968) pp . 83-92, and was also
reprinted in A. Giddens (Ed.), The Sociology of Suicide (London , Frank
Cass, 1971). Pans of Chapters 5 and 6 were previously include in 'Societal
Reactions to Deviance: The Role of Coroners' Definitions', in S. Cohen
(Ed.) , Images of Deviance (Harmondswonh, Penguin Books, 1971) pp.
165-91. Some of the interview data quoted in Chapter 5, 6 and 7 were
derived from a programme prepared for the Open University's course
'Sociological Perspectives' (BBC. Radio 3).
I am indebted to all these sources for permission to reprint the materials
in question .