Three Explanations of Marital Status Differences in Suicide Rates: Social Integration, Marital Status Integration, and the Culture of Suicide

Abstract

Our first goal is to link empirical measures of three theoretical explanations of marital status differences to the variation in male and female standardized suicide difference coefficients SSDCs in 12 developed countries, circa 1960. We include predictors of Durkheim's social integration hypothesis, Gibbs and Martin's concept of marital status integration, and norms on suicide acceptability. All three are significantly related to variation in male and female SSDCs. The second goal is to examine how our empirical indicators impact age-specific differences in the male minus female SSDC—differences that vary by age in all 12 of our study populations. The strongest predictor of these differences is the male minus female difference in the percent married.