Emile Durkheim Sociology Essay Research Paper Emile

Emile Durkheim: Sociology Essay, Research Paper

Emile Durkheim: Sociology

1. Describe where you searched and the resources you found. Cites your most interesting sources.

Our class text book written by Macionis, explained that Emile Durkheim was ” a pioneer of sociology” who studied suicide. Interested to know more, I went to the main library at San Diego State University. I sat down at a computer and opened the SDSU Library PAC. PAC is an acronym for Public Access Catalogue, a database of all the books in the SDSU library. I did an author search and found a book by Emile Durkheim titled “Suicide: A Study in Sociology,” translated from French to English by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson.

I went to the 3rd floor and retrieved the book. This version of “Suicide” began with an editor’s introduction that summarized the book. After reading the 32 page summary by George Simpson my interest took me in another direction.

I went to a computer with an Internet connection and searched for information on the affects of loneliness. The search resulted with an article from the health and science section of the Boston Globe newspaper, titled “Loneliness can be the Death of us.” Written April 22, 1996 by Judy Foreman.

This article talked about how “…social isolation can have severe medical consequences, and close ties with people can significantly increase health and longevity.” The article also mentioned “The Roseto Effect,” a scientific study supporting the article’s claim that loneliness and isolation cause death and disease.

I went back to the computer catalogue, but this time I looked under periodical indexes and opened the expanded general academic index. Then I did a word search for “The Roseto Effect.” I got one listing, an article published in the August 1992 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 82, No. 8, pages 1,089-92, titled “The Roseto Effect: A 50 Year Comparison of Mortality Rates.” The librarian told me the journal was available on the fifth floor. I found it on the shelf, July though December of 1992 issues were bound together inside a blue, hard back cover. The American Journal of Public Health has a well educated readership. It is not the type of periodical I normally read, so I found it interesting to look through. One thing I noticed were the advertisers: American Association of Retired Persons, Basic Books, Harvard University, Howard Hughes, Plenum Publishing, Roche Laboratories, Rockefeller Foundation, Seabury and Smith, Connaught Rabies, Columbia University, Computer Outfitters and GEICO Auto Insurance.

2. According to your sources, what is the latest information and data offered on this topic.

One of the first studies of the power of social support was in 1897 by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. He wrote about the findings of his study in his book titled, “Suicide.” In this book Durkheim uses his structural/functional interpretation of human behavior to explain the uniquely human phenomena of suicide. Durkheim identifies four types of suicide. Egotistic suicides result from too much individualism. Egotists kill themselves as a way of gaining the attention of other people. Anomic suicides occur in times of norm conflict or normlessness (anomie means without norms). Altruistic suicides happen when someone kills himself or herself for the good of the remaining members of the group. Fatalistic suicides arise from extreme social regulation, when people kill themselves because they’ve lost hope. At a glance, suicide may look like an individual, personal act unrelated to society as a whole, but Durkheim establishes that all four types of suicides are due in part to the victim’s faulty social relationships with his or her community. Durkheim’s research led him to conclude that the major factor affecting suicide rates was the degree of social integration of groups. He found that the extent to which an individual is integrated into group life determined whether he would be likely to commit suicide. Durkheim also found that unmarried men and women were more likely to commit suicide than those who are married.

The latest information and data I could find on this subject is in a modern context. Today it is more popular to study heart disease than suicide. Heart disease is the number one killer of Americans; and although slightly fewer people in France die from heart disease, with or without their daily red wine, it is still the number one killer there too. That is why I think that if Durkheim were alive today he would be very interested in the Roseto study. It is a modern version of his own study.

The Roseto study shows the power of social support to increase life expectancy, which is the important factor that it has in common with Durkheim’s study of suicide. The modern twist is that it more specifically shows the power of social support to decrees the rate of heart disease.

The Roseto Study is a longitudinal study of the inhabitancy of Roseto, Pennsylvania, an Italian-American town in eastern Pennsylvania. The population of Roseto has been studied intensively for over fifty years. It has been studied because it was found to have had a strikingly low rate of myocardial infarction (heart attack) during the first thirty years it was studied when compared to Bangor; an immediately adjacent town, and Nazareth, another nearby community. The risk factors fo